Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence

The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

A second leak from last night, this one given to the New York Times, cites other anonymous officials as asserting that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But that NYT story says that “it is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.”

Deep down in its article, the Post notes — rather critically — that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.” But the purpose of both anonymous leaks is to finger the Russian government for these hacks, acting with the motive to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Needless to say, Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome. That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year, but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.

Given the obvious significance of this story — it is certain to shape how people understand the 2016 election and probably foreign policy debates for months if not years to come — it is critical to keep in mind some basic facts about what is known and, more importantly, what is not known:

(1) Nobody has ever opposed investigations to determine if Russia hacked these emails, nor has anyone ever denied the possibility that Russia did that. The source of contention has been quite simple: No accusations should be accepted until there is actual convincing evidence to substantiate those accusations.

There is still no such evidence for any of these claims. What we have instead are assertions, disseminated by anonymous people, completely unaccompanied by any evidence, let alone proof. As a result, none of the purported evidence — still — can be publicly seen, reviewed, or discussed. Anonymous claims leaked to newspapers about what the CIA believes do not constitute proof, and certainly do not constitute reliable evidence that substitutes for actual evidence that can be reviewed. Have we really not learned this lesson yet?

A reminder to take every claim made by unnamed US officials about intelligence conclusions with healthy skepticism.

(2) The reasons no rational person should blindly believe anonymous claims of this sort — even if it is pleasing to believe such claims — should be obvious by now.

Many of those incidents demonstrate, as hurtful as it is to accept, that these agencies even lie when there’s a Democrat overseeing the executive branch. Even in those cases when they are not deliberately lying, they are often gravely mistaken. Intelligence is not a science, and attributing hacks to specific sources is a particularly difficult task, almost impossible to carry out with precision and certainty.

Beyond that, what makes claims from anonymous sources so especially dubious is that their motives cannot be assessed. Who are the people summarizing these claims to the Washington Post? What motives do they have for skewing the assertions one way or the other? Who are the people inside the intelligence community who fully ratify these assertions and who are the ones who dissent? It’s impossible to answer any of these questions because everyone is masked by the shield of anonymity, which is why reports of this sort demand high levels of skepticism, not blind belief.

Most important of all, the more serious the claim is — and accusing a nuclear-armed power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to help the winning candidate is about as serious as a claim can get — the more important it is to demand evidence before believing it. Wars have started over far less serious claims than this one. People like Lindsey Graham are already beating their chest, demanding that the U.S. do everything in its power to punish Russia and “Putin personally.”

Nobody should need an explainer about why it’s dangerous in the extreme to accept such inflammatory accusations on faith or, worse, based on the anonymous assurances of intelligence officials, in lieu of seeing the actual evidence.

(3) An important part of this story, quite clearly, is inter-agency feuding between, at the very least, the CIA and the FBI.

Recall that the top echelon of the CIA was firmly behind Clinton and vehemently against Trump, while at least some powerful factions within the FBI had the opposite position.

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

Meanwhile, key factions in the FBI were furious that Hillary Clinton was not criminally charged for her handling of classified information; pressured FBI Director James Comey into writing a letter that was pretty clearly harmful to Clinton about further investigating the case; and seemed to be improperly communicating with close Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. And while we are now being treated to anonymous leaks about how the CIA believes Putin helped Trump, recall that the FBI, just weeks ago, was shoveling anonymous claims to the New York Times that had the opposite goal:

One can choose to believe whatever anonymous claims from these agencies with a long history of lying and error one wants to believe, based on whatever agenda one has. Or one can wait to review the actual evidence before forming beliefs about what really happened. It should take little effort to realize that the latter option is the only rational path.

(4) Even just within the leaks of the last 24 hours, there are multiple grounds of confusion, contradictions, and uncertainty.

The always-observant Marcy Wheeler last night documented many of those; anyone interested in this story should read her analysis as soon as possible. I want to highlight just a few of these vital contradictions and questions.

To start with, the timing of these leaks is so striking. Even as Democrats have spent months issuing one hysterical claim after the next about Russian interference, the White House, and Obama specifically, have been very muted about all of this. Perhaps that’s because he did not want to appear partisan or be inflammatory, but perhaps it’s because he does not believe there is sufficient proof to accuse the Russian government; after all, if he really believed the Russians did even half of what Democrats claim, wouldn’t he (as some Democrats have argued) be duty-bound to take aggressive action in retaliation?

It was announced yesterday afternoon that Obama had ordered a full review of hacking allegations: a perfectly sensible step that makes clear that an investigation is needed, and evidence disclosed, before any definitive conclusions can be reached. It was right on the heels of that announcement that this CIA leak emerged: short-cutting the actual, deliberative investigative process Obama had ordered in order to lead the public to believe that all the answers were already known and, before the investigation even starts, that Russia was guilty of all charges.

More important is what the Post buries in its story: namely, what are the so-called “minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment”? How “minor” are they? And what do these conclusions really mean if, as the Post’s sources admit, the CIA is not even able to link the hack to the actual Russian government, but only to people outside the government (from the Post: “Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees”)?

This is why it’s such a shoddy and unreliable practice to conduct critical debates through conflicting anonymous leaks. Newspapers like the Post have the obvious incentive to hype the flashy, flamboyant claims while downplaying and burying the caveats and conflicting evidence. None of these questions can be asked, let alone answered, because the people who are making these claims are hidden and the evidence is concealed.

(5) Contrary to the declarations of self-vindication by supremely smug Democrats, none of this even relates to, let alone negates, the concerns over their election-year McCarthyite behavior and tactics.

Contrary to the blatant straw man many Democrats are railing against, nobody ever said it was McCarthyite to want to investigate claims of Russian hacking. To the contrary, critics of Clinton supporters have been arguing for exactly that: that these accusations should not be believed in the absence of meaningful inquiry and evidence, which has thus far been lacking.

What critics have said is McCarthyite — and, as one of those critics, I fully stand by this — is the lowly tactic of accusing anyone questioning these accusations, or criticizing the Clinton campaign, of being Kremlin stooges or Putin agents. Back in August, after Democrats decided to smear Jill Stein as a Putin stooge, here’s how I defined the McCarthyite atmosphere that Democrats have deliberately cultivated this year:

So that’s the Democratic Party’s approach to the 2016 election. Those who question, criticize or are perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump, WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein. Other than loyal Clinton supporters, is there anyone left who is not covertly controlled by or in service to The Ruskies?

Concerns over Democrats’ McCarthyism never had anything to do with a desire for an investigation into the source of the DNC and Podesta hacking; everyone favored such investigations. Indeed, accusations that Democrats were behaving in a McCarthyite manner were predicated — and still are — on their disgusting smearing as Kremlin agents anyone who wanted evidence and proof before believing these inflammatory accusations about Russia.

To see the true face of this neo-McCarthyism, watch this amazing interview from this week with Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the party’s leading Russia hawks (he’s quoted in the Post article attacking Obama for not retaliating against Putin). When Schiff is repeatedly asked by the interviewer, Tucker Carlson, for evidence to support his allegation that Putin ordered the hacking of Podesta’s emails, Schiff provides none.

What he does instead is accuse Carlson of being a Kremlin stooge and finally tells him he should put his program on RT. That — which has become very typical Democratic rhetoric — is the vile face of neo-McCarthyism that Democrats have adopted this year, and nothing in this CIA leak remotely vindicates or justifies it:

Needless to say, questions about who hacked the DNC and Podesta email accounts are serious and important ones. The answers have widespread implications on many levels. That’s all the more reason these debates should be based on publicly disclosed evidence, not competing, unverifiable anonymous leaks from professional liars inside government agencies, cheered by drooling, lost partisans anxious to embrace whatever claims make them feel good, all conducted without the slightest regard for rational faculties or evidentiary requirements.

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But, but, but,…It’s the absolute consensus, sort of, of 57 intelligence agencies that the Russians wrote “Yay Trump, KKK” on a woman’s hijab after drawing swastikas on the black Baptist synagogue she was attending, and then burning it down. Just how much proof do you need, Glenn?

i have to say, that I have generally been a fan of your work but your EXTREME Bias shows here. You know that there is a difference between the ppl who run the DOJ DOD etc, they are political stooges. The CIA ANALYSTS are A-Political.
It was CIA analysts who during briefing mentioned The Godfather of ISIS, in another terror camp in Iraq, with nothing to do with WMD’s or Sadamn Hussein. But Cheney, Rumsfield actually called the analyst who put together the briefing and asked her to change her report. The speech that Colin Powell gave, was totally off script from what the CIA said he should say. Iran Contra? Seriously? That was still during the Cold War, and most of the jokers cannot remember Bush Jr. The FBI is not A-Political. What James Comey did, violated the hatch act and it was because the group of FBI agents in NYC who hate hillary.
Whic you obviously do too, but using your credibility to dismantle something significant is a shame. Oh Well, who cares about loosing readers right?

Using the Bush WMD intelligence as an example is ridiculous. The actual CIA document was far different from whatever Tenet may have said to Bush. We know that because it was obtained under FOIA and it’s been published. The CIA said the opposite about WMD in the full report. I’d expect Mr. Greenwald to have read that…

What do you believe of the Russian hacking plot? I believe that Putin wants sanctions dropped so he can build his personal wealth beyond the 86 billion dollars of the poor Russians money he already has. Common Russians live in poverty he lives like a king. He is the totalitarian leader of a kleptocracy. The bringing down of American democracy comes much later. So that as a motive is little weak. It could be a vendetta as thugs are predisposed to it. Don’t be stupid, “follow the money” will be the rallying call for democrats from now on. With Trump as president, I believe everything that isn’t nailed down, will be stolen. It’s already begun. If you can’t see that, your blind or maybe brainwashed. Stephen Mnuchin, what a great choice for Fed Chairman. Not.

The leaks have revolved around the internet worm fzzybear and cozybear for penetrating private servers. Now, I for one don’t believe that the CIA did it. Really? That’s pitiful and ridiculous. If I were a CIA operative I would be irate that they (the Russians) would think to do that to us. Again that’s something that a punk would do. Putin a classic punk and thug by US standards. He might be better thought of in Russia, but why would we go out of our way to back a douche murderer. I believe in what Reagan called them. I think only a fool would trust a man who took absolute power the way Putin did.

“I am also instructing James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to arrange for briefings to any elector who wants one. Fifty-six electors have signed a letter asking for an intelligence briefing on Russia’s role in this election. They want access to the best possible information before they cast their votes. As president, I see it as my duty to provide it.” — The outgoing Nig-A !

JAMES CLAPPER ????
—————————————————————————————————–
So this MOFO is going to tell the truth to a bunch lower MOFOs ?
Gimme a break already !!
GEEZ ,, this is such a “PASS THE CRAP ” game .

Why would the CIA attempt to short cut “the actual, deliberative investigative process Obama had ordered”? Maybe because the CIA did the hacking and left phony evidence to make it look like Russia. I suspect that the CIA fears a vigorous investigation might uncover the CIA’s own efforts to get Trump elected (not to mention a sequence of characteristic October swing-state terror attacks orchestrated during both of Obama’s campaigns. The framed “perps” were either publicly identified as “Democratic Party Operatives” or superficially resembled members of Obama’s family, e.g. tall thin mulattos).

I found this article informative, but in light of the CIA’s long history of lying, it disturbs me that Glenn Greenwald seems to have believed the former CIA officials’ claims that they preferred Clinton hook, line, and sinker. I say they’re lying. All these CIA people wanted Trump, but they made sure they had a plan in place to retain power no matter who won. Pretending to support Clinton gave the same CIA power players a chance to get appointed CIA head if Clinton had won, and also provides cover so no one will imagine that the CIA conducted the hacks to get Trump elected.

Very good and well researched article. Thank you Glenn. I don’t always agree with Glenn, but he is the only writer who’s work I read on the Intercept. Glenn, please, keep us informed with real information and well researched news.

Along the lines of “how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.” but with a longer, big-picture view, enjoy “Stepping Back from Trump’s Election: Critique of Underlying US Culture in a List – 25 Limitations”http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/961/1/
– Jan Lundberg, independent oil industry analyst, anti-plastics activist, musician

DocHollywood ? Bill Owen
December 14 2016, 9:01 p.m.
Hi Bill;
I genuinely appreciate your intent and what you say.
he is a troll.
he is a dupe
he is stupid
he can’t be an agent.
he’s merely a clownish diversion, not a distraction……..”

See what happens Doc when you start taking this to such an obsessive and personal level? You look childish and angry – and you don’t rebut a single political argument I make.

I don’t think I have described Chomsky as anti-American. When you look at the descriptions like “evil nature, “world domination” or “holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world” then you can immediately see that this is how certain folks view the US. There is nothing new or earth shattering about this.- craigsummers

The post lightly [edited] for accuracy:

“I don’t think[.]

I have described Chomsky as anti-American[, but I’m too ignorant to recognize that I did because] when you look at the description “world domination” then you can immediately see that this is how certain folks [like Chomsky] view the US[: the subtitle of one of his best selling books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance might be a clue for anyone as uninformed as me.

But I don’t bother to consider what I post. I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about.] There is nothing new or earth shattering about this.”

Damn, you are right Doc. Chomsky actually has a new book out which I plan to read. Maybe you have read it? “Hegemony or Survival: PNAC’s Quest to Initiate the Civil War in Syria”. Should be a good read……

Why do you bother linking to something as a reply to me? Is it your rational-wiki site? Does it warn of “cranks” as you call them? I have not looked even to see where you want to send me. Blind linkys are dangerous.

Please post an actual, rational, comment so we might sort all of this out.
I know, you have said you would ignore me, too, a few (million) times but, then you respond with a taunt or insult.

Somewhere in an analysis of the alleged Russian hacks I read that the malware used that supposedly has the “fingerprints” or the GRU had itself been infected with a virus or in some way made vulnerable to third-party use by independent hackers, so attribution is completely unreliable. Does anyone else recall reading this, and if so, where?

“I don’t think I have described Chomsky as anti-American. When you look at the descriptions like “evil nature, “world domination” or “holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world” then you can immediately see that this is how certain folks view the US. There is nothing new or earth shattering about this. Obviously Joffe based his definition on experience.”

Slightly [edited] for clarity

I don’t think[.] I have described [everyone who doesn’t agree with me] as anti-American [or a Russian dupe because I explicitly trust anything the U.S. government says or does]. When [I] look at the descriptions like “evil nature, “world domination” or “holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world” [I] can immediately [dismiss them out of hand because I am relying on only government disinformation] that [others don’t take as fact.] [T]his is how [I] view the US[:] There is nothing [the US can say or do that is wrong or unjust. There are no] earth shattering [facts that I would allow myself to believe that would threaten my unwavering belief in the USG and be a completely submissive pawn to their authority].

You are clearly better than the original (DocHollywood), but you need to cut out my original text above your interpretation. It gets to be too long. You can do this by posting directly below my post. By the way, please don’t get bogged down in PNAC conspiracy theories, OK?

I always assumed it was the NSA that hacked DNC and Clinton campaign servers. They were supposed to have been very unhappy about prospect of Clinton winning. But as article suggests, it’s hard to know which agency, or who in which agency, is on who’s side. Personally, I see CIA as relic of Cold War and spy-game era. It’s grasping at straws in effort to ensure its survival. If Trump can do one good thing, it would be to mothball the CIA or ignore it into irrelevancy.

. . .I post at the Intercept, Guardian and elsewhere because I am a political hack. . . .Craig Murray is simply an anti-American, self flattering (i.e. a liar) political hack who has zero credibility when it comes to Russian hackers and human rights activism. DocHollywood misused my post to apply the same arbitrary criticisms and conspiracy theories about US foreign policy that he has been pressing for years.
– craigsummers, December 13 2016, 6:18 a.m.

The post lightly [edited] for accuracy:

“. . .I post at the Intercept, Guardian and elsewhere because I am a political hack.

[So if I just for once abandon my hypocrisy and] apply [to myself] the same arbitrary criticisms [of others that I have] been pressing for years, [it follows that] ‘Craig[summers] is simply a [pro-]American, self flattering (i.e. a liar) political hack who has zero credibility when it comes to Russian hackers and human rights activism.”

“……..German newspaper publisher and political scientist Josef Joffe suggests five classic aspects of the phenomenon: reducing Americans to stereotypes, believing the United States to have an irremediably evil nature, ascribing to the U.S. establishment a vast conspiratorial power aimed at utterly dominating the globe, holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world, and seeking to limit the influence of the United States by destroying it or by cutting oneself and one’s society off from its polluting products and practices.[14]……[believing that defunct PNAC controls the policies of the Obama Administration]……..” my addition in brackets

That’s a caricature of what’s called “anti-American”, which is really just anti-imperialism. For example, would you say Noam Chomsky believes the US has a “irremediably evil nature”, when he has stated the opposite many times, and has explained that any power in the same position would behave the same way?

Now, wouldn’t you say the description you quote applies more accurately to the way you and most US centrists view Russia?

I don’t think I have described Chomsky as anti-American. When you look at the descriptions like “evil nature, “world domination” or “holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world” then you can immediately see that this is how certain folks view the US. There is nothing new or earth shattering about this. Obviously Joffe based his definition on experience.

Wasn’t the USSR the evil empire? However, Russia does not fall into that category (with the possible exception of their war in Ukraine which is really fighting for a cold war concept of sphere of influence). Putin is pragmatic, authoritarian and understands what keeps him in power. He is a brilliant propagandists (as was Ahmadinejad).

“…… And why exactly do you have “credibility” to opine on Mr. Murray’s “credibility” in the arenas of Russian hackers and human rights activism? ”

Oh I don’t know, maybe by what he writes? Does that make sense? I really saw all that I needed to see from the one line I quoted from Murray’s blog. I’m not going to repeat it here, but it disqualified him as a human rights activist right away. According to the Guardian:

“……..In October 2002, Murray made a speech to his fellow diplomats and Uzbekistani officials at a human rights conference in Tashkent in which he became the first western official for four years to state publicly that “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy”, and to highlight the “prevalence of torture in Uzbekistani prisons” in a system where “brutality is inherent”. Highlighting a case in which two men were boiled to death, he added: “All of us know that this is not an isolated incident.”…..”

This IS courageous – exposing state torture. Yet the same idiot had the gall to say that “thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today”. He certainly must understand that based on pictures smuggled out of Syria that 25,000-50,000 people held in the Syrian regime detention died from torture, neglect, starvation and murder (and there are tens of thousands more still in detention). I would say that Assad’s record is far worse than the government of Uzbekistan. Murray cannot plead ignorance to the indiscriminate use of barrel bombs targeting hospitals and civilians by the regime (and Russia); the use of chemical weapons by Syria (documented by the UN); the destruction of Aleppo from Syrian and Russian bombers; and most importantly, he seems to ignore that Assad initiated the war to begin with. Amnesty International could write a book on Assad’s war crimes. Murray also cannot claim ignorance to the fact that people in Aleppo are seriously at risk for arrest, torture and detention after the rebels are defeated.

If you claim to be a human rights activist, put politics aside and act like one. It’s clear he can’t because – like his “friend” Assange – he is simply a far left wing political hack (thanks for reminding me).

As far as his credentials on the DNC hack and the claim that the theft was conducted by an insider, I certainly am not going to take his word for it. Let’s say the insider comes forward and the FBI is allowed to interrogate him. If he does turn out to be an “insider” (not a hack job), then Murray was right and I’m OK with that. That would be the truth. However, currently, we have three independent cyber-security firms and 17 intelligence departments in the US who are accusing the Russian of the hack based on evidence collected from the DNC computer i.e., Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. That is far more convincing than what Murray has at the moment. Indeed, Edward Snowden also indicated that tracing a hacker is easy with Xkeyscore (Mackey article):

“…….Even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops……”

Can you imagine China hacking into US private business and the government? For shame. You can now return to what you are good at – apologizing for US policies past and present and suing people online.

The state-operated New York Times is reporting today that what crowdstrike found on the DNC computer did indeed link to the Russian government (Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election http://nyti.ms/2a0zep8}:

July 2015
Federal Security Service
“……..A hacking group possibly linked to the agency, the main successor to the K.G.B., entered Democratic National Committee servers undetected for nearly a year, security researchers said. The group was nicknamed Cozy Bear, the Dukes or A.P.T. 29 for “advanced persistent threat.”……” – reported by NYT

March 2016
G.R.U.: Military Intelligence
“………Investigators believe that the G.R.U., or a hacking group known as Fancy Bear or A.P.T. 28, was the second group to break into the D.N.C., but it has played a bigger role in releasing the committee’s emails…..”.- reported by NYT

WikiLeaks
“…….The website released about 50,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers. It is unclear how WikiLeaks obtained the emails. But Russian intelligence agencies are prime suspects, researchers said…..” reported by NYT

In my honest (and neutral) opinion, there is little doubt that the Russian intelligence services worked with Assange to release the information (probably through a third party). The political motivation for Assange makes this accusation reasonable considering his anti-American view point. He almost certainly knew the emails came from Russian intelligence services. Assange is a really a scumbag (in my neutral opinion).

Again, no. First, there’s no evidence linking FancyBear to the Russian government. That link appears to be a guess. Second, the material Wikileaks released was much more interesting and comprehensive than anything released by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks. It seems quite plausible that it didn’t come from Guccifer 2.0. It might have not come from a leak at all. The article admits the source of Wikileaks material is unknown. Third, there are indications that Guccifer 2.0 is fairly naive about covering his tracks.

“………CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR. We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well. In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis. Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services…….”

There is nothing set in concrete, but the independent identification of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear strongly implicates the Russian government. Is this really so surprising?

It’s a subjective article. Both cozy bear group and fancy bear group have been involved in a lot of intrusions. Many of these intrusions are not aligned with russian interests or would be deemed against russian interests.

While this particular breach may have served russian interests to disrupt our electoral process, their is once again, no smoking gun that indicates Russian state involvement.

With all the evidence that’s been provided, you could say lizard squad who is famous for it’s DDOS attacks has been acting at russias behest.

Crowdstrike’s own assessment throws out a lot of technical detail for the average joe. What it essentially states is any guy and his cousin with a professional skillset in cyber security could have perpetrated this. Which once again, tells us nothing.

If nothing else, the russian government really stopped giving a shit in 2014. Meaning, their intelligence sources changed the way they engaged in their cyber proliferation. Prior to 2014, once these people were discovered, they disappeared and engaged in counter forensic’s. Post 2014, no fucks are given. They get discovered, they literally do not care, and do not disappear. This is a noticed behavior by every single cyber security firm.

I’m a firm believer in common sense, but no the shoe doesn’t fit.

The real tragedy in all of this and what should scare people the most is that no one seems to really care about the political corruption. Moreover, that revealing it, no matter who did it, is considered a disruption to our electoral process.

“……..Crowdstrike’s own assessment throws out a lot of technical detail for the average joe. What it essentially states is any guy and his cousin with a professional skillset in cyber security could have perpetrated this. Which once again, tells us nothing……”

Totally unpersuasive. No links, nothing of value. Just a bunch of denials on behalf of the Russian government. The intrusion was so simple, even a caveman could do it. Right and Geico can save you 20% on your car insurance……

“or painting yourself [-Mona-] out as being victimized by this particular commenter’s ravings”

Indeed, Mona warped Pizzagate into real harm like witch burning or some bullshit.
She edits a blog that warns everyone of what crazy folks are capable of. She has a long history of warning the board who is too crazy to respond to … as if we can’t figure that out.

America is getting a little taste of the paranoia other nations know. And it isn’t pleasant.

…

…we can’t indulge hysteria for too long. If Russia has a hostile aim to weaken the U.S., creating the widespread belief that half the political class is actually the craven pawn of the Kremlin is almost as useful as actually subverting our democracy. America’s institutions work, in part, because America’s political class is able to assume the good faith and patriotism even of their partisan opponents. When deep disagreement over foreign policy priorities becomes the occasion for calling each other traitors, we are rapidly heading toward real political dysfunction.

you need to be careful reading yahoo headlines….
what matters is that Hillary lost
the Dems were crushed
The Russia-did-it scam is being exposed for the garbage it is.
The conflict in Syria is OVER and Russia did that!
US intervention in the middle east is criminal
the CIA lies most of the time
president obama despises whistleblowers and loves corruption
the YINON PLAN is washed up

Then you should stop posting all together or at least change your style by providing some evidence or better logic for your inflammatory statements.

This is an interactive site. Albeit, Mona is a rather zealous personality, she has every right to post here, just as you do.

You can’t really believe that you just post stuff and expect someone not challenge it, do you? Really?

I would also like to say, that I believe you have every right to post your ideas or opinions, (even if I disagree with them) but then Mona or anyone else also has the right to challenge your opinions and positions.

Also, starting off a new post with terms like “vicious”, “lying”, “abusive” and “troll” aren’t going to draw you any positive comments from her.

The only remedy I intend to employ is to advertise — when she is participating and making outrageous and bizarre claims — that she has done that.

How’s that working out for you so far?

Have you called the agencies she has purportedly “reported you” to in such an “unspeakably vile manner” and asked them if she actually has, or the status of those reports? If not why not? That would seem more productive than engaging her here or legitimizing her lunacy by suggesting how horrible horrible horrible and vile and abominable all those purported actions are by some poor impoverished woman in India who appears to be struggling with some serious issues?

I mean just a tip from someone who loves a good internet dustup as much as the next guy, but it is a lot more fun for the reader when you find clever ways to mock and deride a loony interlocutor (assuming you feel so compelled other than to just ignore him/her) than actually treating his/her claims as serious or legitimate, which you do using the rhetoric of how “vile”, “abominable”, “outrageous” and “bizarre” et al such purported actions said interlocutor has taken against you are, instead of appearing like you are being victimized by them in the real world.

Now outrageous and bizarre aren’t half bad, but how about “cuckoo for cocoa puffs” or “nuttier than squirrel shit” or “batshit insane” or maybe even try to throw in some good descriptors like birdbrained, brainless, boobish, preposterous, buffoonish, clownish, empty-headed, witless, mindless, daft, dippy, half-baked, . . . .

Just sayin.

Seriously, just my $0.02, but you really aren’t doing yourself any favors other than to mock or ignore here, because you just appear to legitimize her ravings by responding to them as if they were serious.

Information Glenn Greenwald and his idol Vladimir Putin don’t want you to see: The Mitrokhin Archive and propornot.com Mitrokhin was the Soviet version of Snowden. Except when Russians do it it’s called being a traitor, not a whistle blower.

What are you babbling about exactly? The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of hand written notes made by a KGB archivist prior to 1992. Propornot.com is a site that pretends to blacklist non-centrist media outlets as “Russian propaganda mouthpieces” based on nothing, and which further tells us:

Obtain news from actual reporters, who report to an editor and are professionally accountable for mistakes. We suggest NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, VICE, etc, and especially your local papers and local TV news channels. Support them by subscribing, if you can!

Still no proof. All the CIA has said this entire time is, “The Russian did it. The Russians hacked us, and it affected the way people voted.” Really? So, you are saying that a corrupt organization was revealed to the public as being corrupt (DNC) and we are supposed to be mad at Russia? No. The CIA is scapegoating because their candidate did not win. End of story. Also, this shows how stupid the CIA and the Media thinks American citizens actually are. “You were all persuaded by the release of all those emails!” Or maybe us Americans were fed up with the lies disseminated by the CIA. If the Russians really did hack the DNC they did the American public a HUGE service. We should be focused on the authors of those emails, and the intent of the DNC to rig the election; an election the DNC LOST. Toddler Tantrum Triggered! HAhahahaha

Are the MSM asking US to believe Trump or the CIA?Duh.
But I’m sure many once fervent anti CIA demoncrats will now reverse course like JK windsurfers.F*cking hypocrites.
Again,will someone point out one tangible productive act by the CIA in its history?(sssh…its classified-ho ho)

There is 1 huge problem with your analysis: by definition spy agencies cannot present the evidence they acquired because it would reveal their sources and tactics. So this can never be discussed openly in the public domain. If you claim that makes it impossible to say anything about these Russian hacks, you’re basically agreeing to roll over and die to the Russians.

That, and it’s not like *nobody* is seeing the evidence–they’re sharing it with Congress, and even the GOP leadership appears to be taking notice. Glenn is a great investigative voice, but he’s glibly trotting past that little point.

Take a chill pill.
What the hell does Russia want from US?Fracked oil?When they have more untapped energy possibly than anyone else?
Our trillion dollar deficit treasure?
You are worked up over nonsense,Russia might have wanted Trump,but like everyone else,they thought HRC a lock.Why would they jeopardize an already precarious relationship,caused by US aggression in Ukraine,Georgia and the ME?No way,as Russia is not historically an instigator in the first place,its usually reactive.Slow to saddle,quick to ride.
Poppycock from zion.

This is either an attempted coup by the Democrats in an attempt to strip away electoral College voters or the worlds biggest temper tantrum. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that shows why the Obama intelligence agency believes this other than motive. Intelligence agencies work with who and how and do not rely on why. Conjuring up a motive and drawing a conclusion based off of that is the exact opposite of what intelligence agencies do. So there are reports of who and why that say nothing about how. That is bogus politicized intelligence. Valid intelligence always focuses on how first.

No, it was actually the statement by Murray in the link from the galactus post which bothered me.

“……..As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on…….”

He clearly gives the Assad regime a free ride when it comes to barrel bombs, chemical weapons, the death of 25000-50000 people in Assad detention facilities, targeting of hospitals and civilians – and even the start of the war by Assad who used a military style crackdown on a democracy movement associated with the Arab Spring.
– craigsummers

The reply lightly [edited] for accuracy:

“No, it was actually the [truth] which bothered me:

“. . .As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on. . .”

[I would prefer to ignore reality and instead] give the A[merican and Saudi] regime[s] a free ride when it comes to [cluster] bombs, [supplying money, logistical support, and] weapons [to ISIS], the death[s] of 25000-50000 [hundreds of thousands of innocent] people in [wars of aggression], targeting of hospitals[, markets, schools, weddings, funerals] and civilians – and even the start of the war[s] by [the US which planned “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran,” according to General (retired) Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

When not bombing and invading their countries, the US has consistently thwarted] democracy [for] the Arab[s in the ME by giving ‘free rides’ to many brutal dictators from Egypt to Iran to Saudi Arabia; it even supported Saddam Hussein at the time he was carrying-out some of his worst atrocities, going so far as to supply him with the necessary components to make the chemical weapons he used against the Kurds.

DocHollywood missed the point (albeit purposely). If I had a blog, there would be nothing at the top claiming I am a “human rights activist”. I’m not. I post at the Intercept, Guardian and elsewhere because I am a political hack. Craig Murray isn’t a human rights activist either – nor is anyone else that sweeps the war crimes and atrocities committed by the Assad regime under the carpet. The four year agony of people in East Aleppo isn’t nearly over, and even if it was, Assad caused it in the first place. That is lost on DocHollywood who seems to believe that the US planned to start the war in Syria in 1998 at a PNAC conference. You simply lose all ability to reason when you are that driven by opposition to American policies. This happens to people like Doug Salzmann who believes that the 2014 elections in Syria were “valid”.

Craig Murray is simply an anti-American, self flattering (i.e. a liar) political hack who has zero credibility when it comes to Russian hackers and human rights activism. DocHollywood misused my post to apply the same arbitrary criticisms and conspiracy theories about US foreign policy that he has been pressing for years.

Craig Murray is simply an anti-American, self flattering (i.e. a liar) political hack who has zero credibility when it comes to Russian hackers and human rights activism.

Nice name calling. You forgot “radical leftist” though, which really detracts from the overall tenor of your comment.

And why exactly do you have “credibility” to opine on Mr. Murray’s “credibility” in the arenas of Russian hackers and human rights activism?

<blockquote
If I had a blog, there would be nothing at the top claiming I am a “human rights activist”. I’m not. I post at the Intercept, Guardian and elsewhere because I am a political hack.

So your opinion is that you are “political hack” and Craig Murray is a “political hack” as well.

Does that mean that you share this same bio of life’s work and achievements:

Murray had a number of overseas postings with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to Africa and to Europe. In London, he was appointed to the FCO’s Southern European Department, as Cyprus desk officer, and later became head of the Maritime Section. In August 1991 he worked in the Embargo Surveillance Centre as the head of the FCO section. This job entailed monitoring the Iraqi government’s attempts at smuggling weapons and circumventing sanctions. His group gave daily reports to Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
[snip]
Murray was appointed as the British ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002, at the age of 43, . . . .
[snip]
The FCO exonerated him of all 18 charges in January 2004 after a four-month investigation but reprimanded him for speaking about them.
[snip]
In recognition of his campaigning work on torture and human rights he was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in January 2006.[53] In November 2006, he was awarded the Premio Alta Qualità della Città di Bologna.[54] Murray turned down three honours from the Queen as titles are “not his thing”.

Say what you want about the Murray’s private life, but every time he’s been threatened with a lawsuit, the plaintiffs have all given up trying to advance his/her/their claims against him. It appears he’s quite confident, and can prove any allegations he makes, particularly of the type of allegations he made against the Uzbekistan government, its oligarchs, and various UK and US officials or agencies on the subject of torture.

Now of course someone like you might refer to someone who put their professional livelihood and career on the line to actually speak out, or speak truth to power, on the topic of human rights violations and/or complicity in same by his own government, to be a “political hack”. But that’s because you are about as far from a defender of “human rights” or willing to speak truth to power as just about anybody who has ever posted in these threads. In fact, quite the opposite, you are a defender of human rights abuses and their abusers.

So I guess we can all judge for ourselves who is closer to being a “human rights activist” in the world and who isn’t, and who is a “political hack” and who isn’t. IMHO, Craig Murray is the former based on his life and work, whereas you are the latter based on, well, the apparent fact that you comment on the internet about shit until recently you didn’t even understand how to link to (unlike Craig Murray).

If I had a blog, there would be nothing at the top claiming I am a “human rights activist”. I’m not. I post at the Intercept, Guardian and elsewhere because I am a political hack. — Craig Summers

Sorry about typo not ending that blockquote.

I really think you should append the above to every comment you post. It’s about the most honest thing you’ve ever posted in these threads, and just about says it all about who you are and how you think about the world.

Or you could simply say “I’m a political know-nothing hack who posts on the Internet, who recently learned like 6th graders the world over how to link to a source on the Internet and then talk out my ass about it, just like a 6th graders the world over.”

That would be pretty accurate as well, and not to malign the intellectual or moral integrity of the average global 6th graders, as by all appearances they are more advanced in both categories than you are.

* Information or publicity put out by an organization or government to spread and promote a policy, idea, doctrine, or cause.

Propaganda, that’s what this is..and no, I don’t mean this fine article, I mean what our government and “media” is now peddling big-time.

Propaganda regarding “evidence” they have that Russia influenced the election..

Propaganda surrounding so-called fake news..

Propaganda that is leading to very real censorship.

The House and Senate just recently passed “anti propaganda” legislation, seeking to be given the authority to blacklist, even ban websites that they deem a threat. How presumptious of them!
The “House” vote, because that’s exactly what it is, was around 390-10 for Censorship. .yay..

It seems that Government is on trial right now…a public trial, you might say, as many people are paying attention attentively.

Are they gonna fess up that evidence that they’ve been claiming they have,, on and off and then on again, for the past six months?

No “well, we’ve GOT the damning evidence, but we’d be endangering national security if we let you proles see it”..that shit doesn’t fly any longer..

We want the evidence..and it has to be PUBLIC with FULL DISCLOSURE.

I mean, not only are these claims damning and inflammatory to Russia, which ultimately puts my ass in more jeopardy, and even more damning and inflammatory towards the President-elect Donald Trump..but the biggest travesty is how they are trying to subvert our basic human rights by imposing Censorship on us all, because of their very own propaganda that they peddle!(psst,; I’m talking to you too EU, didn’t you just pass some Draconian censorship “legislation” as well?)…

Freedom of speech? They are legislating away our freedom of speech, and if you get right down to it, our freedom of “thought”, right before our very eyes..

We’re getting into uncharted territories here, as this very public trial continues..

You two ” Gals” must stop this nonsense . Your audience is entitled to more than a ” Hissy Fit ” ! We expect good reporting .
I suggest a Liverwurst Sandwich , on Rye , with mustard , and a pickle on the side .

Well, that’s euphemism. To avoid the clear meaning of the proper term. Dick Cheney is many things, but intellectually impaired is not one of them. He can reason, and understands perfectly well why “enhanced interrogation” was the “necessary” phrase.

Newsflash: Joseph Stalin also was not shorted in the IQ department. To understand that monsters can reason is not to be a “sociopath.” Altho at some point he likely crossed over into clinical paranoia (and was not wholly rational), when he distorted words and employed euphemism, he generally understood what he was doing.

Glenn, or somebody… I wish you’d explain how leaks should work in modern news media. Is it better not to say anything even though the info is highly relevant and individuals with the info are willing to share anonymously. But if the story is vital and evidence is presented, couldn’t it compromise intel gathering ability and possibly put lives at risk?
What should news provider do?

And while thinking of evidence, where’s the evidence that the WikiLeaks disclosures about the DNC and Clinton weren’t partly ginned up before they were given to WikiLeaks?
L

Now, the left-wing media is passing out tin foil hats to everyone in sight and telling them to start hyperventilating about the “Russians defeated Hillary” narrative until a “consensus” is reached among them all. When a sufficient number of delusional leftists achieve a uniform hallucination that blames Hillary Clinton’s defeat on someone other than Hillary Clinton, the shared hallucination is then deemed a “fact.” The fact is this is just another Clinton OP gone belly up!

There is only one ‘source’ behind all the election hacking hulabaloo,it’s Crowd Strike; America’s premium cyber attack specialists. The rest of it is repeating the story to develop credibility.

They been in on all the biggies if not preventing very much they are johnnies on the spot for applying their patented software and finding out f there is anybody on your network who shouldn’t be on your network. They claim not only to find the ratholes in software and design where the rodents crept in . the claim to be able to tell the network owners where the rodents crapped and, creeping back out, where they took their looted files.

These were the yobbos who tagged the Norks for splurging Sony prawduct all over the internet or free. They helped the Germans find out what was wrong with the Bundestag site – it had been hacked!. They pegged the Russians mooching around the servers of some of Americas top enterprises and they’ve identified the same family of ‘bears’ fouling the DNC server. In fact they’ve even traced them back to the identical same server in Russia – the same one they used for their 2015 campaign. Imagine that: a ‘cutting-edge’ highly technical and sophisticated spy agency that doesn’t know spot one about internet anonymity! It’s good that these ‘spy agencies’ make it so easy from the bozos at Crowd Strike. They are so busy chasing them down they just have to be worth every dollar they charge.

Too bad they can’t prevent anything. Yet – maybe just a few more millions for the breakthrough?

We don’t necessarily have to depend on anonymous sources. The security community seems to think there is a pretty clear case for Russian involvement.
—–
Streamed live on Dec 8, 2016

Since the June 2016 announcement that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had been breached by two Russia-based threat groups known as FANCY BEAR and COZY BEAR, the story has evolved from a presumed espionage operation into a series of strategic leaks and conflicting attribution claims. In this presentation, we’ll demonstrate techniques used to identify additional malicious infrastructure, assess the validity of the Guccifer 2.0 persona and other outlets like DCLeaks, and the strength of the attribution analysis.

Toni Gidwani is the Director of Research Operations at ThreatConnect and leads ThreatConnect’s research team, an elite group of globally-acknowledged cybersecurity experts dedicated to tracking down existing and emerging cyber threats. Prior to joining ThreatConnect, Toni led analytic teams in the U.S. Department of Defense. She is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University.

interesting that we dont hear anything about the US hacking Russian systems. Also could be that American systems, some of them, are utter crap and easy to hack. Gee, i wonder which ones that might be….

Sprey was referring to the current belief that the Russians had hacked into the communications of the Democratic National Committee, election-related computer systems in Arizona and Illinois, and the private emails of influential individuals, notably Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — and then malignly leaked the contents onto the internet. This, according to legions of anonymous officials quoted without challenge across the media, was clearly an initiative authorized at the highest level in Moscow. To the Washington Post, the hacks and leaks were unquestionably part of a “broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.”

In early October, this assessment was endorsed by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security. Though it expressed confidence that the Russian government had engineered the D.N.C. hacks, their curiously equivocal joint statement appeared less certain as to Moscow’s role in the all-important leaks, saying only that they were “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” As for the most serious intrusion into the democratic process — the election-system hacks — the intelligence agencies took a pass. Although many of those breaches had come from “servers operated by a Russian company,” the statement read, the United States was “not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.”

The company in question is owned by Vladimir Fomenko, a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur based in Siberia. In a series of indignant emails, Fomenko informed me that he merely rents out space on his servers, which are scattered throughout several countries, and that hackers have on occasion used his facilities for criminal activities “without our knowledge.” Although he has “information that undoubtedly will help the investigation,” Fomenko complained that nobody from the U.S. government had contacted him. He was upset that the FBI had “found it necessary to make a loud statement through the media” when he would have happily assisted them. Furthermore, these particular “criminals” had stiffed him $290 in rental fees.

As it happened, a self-identified solo hacker from Romania named Guccifer 2.0 had made public claim to the D.N.C. breaches early on, but this was generally written off as either wholly false or Russian disinformation. During the first presidential debate, on September 26, Hillary Clinton blithely asserted that Vladimir Putin had “let loose cyberattackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. And we recently have learned that, you know, that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information.”

By “wreak havoc,” Clinton presumably had in mind such embarrassing revelations as the suggestion by a senior D.N.C. official that the party play the religious card against Bernie Sanders in key Southern races, or her chummy confabulations with Wall Street banks, or her personal knowledge that our Saudi allies have been “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups.” It made sense, therefore, to create a distraction by loudly asserting a sinister Russian connection — a tactic that has proved eminently successful.

Donald Trump’s rebuttal (“I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the D.N.C. . . . It could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”) earned him only derision. But a closer examination of what few facts are known about the hack suggests that Trump may have been onto something.

[…]

“OK,” wrote Jeffrey Carr, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global, in a derisive blog post on the case. “Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker.” As Carr, a rare skeptic regarding the official line on the hacks, explained to me, “They’re basically saying that the Russian intelligence services are completely inept. That one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, that they have no concern about using a free Russian email account or a Russian server that has already been known to be affiliated with cybercrime. This makes them sound like the Keystone Cops. Then, in the same breath, they’ll say how sophisticated Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities are.”

In reality, Carr continued, “It’s almost impossible to confirm attribution in cyberspace.” For example, a tool developed by the Chinese to attack Google in 2009 was later reused by the so-called Equation Group against officials of the Afghan government. So the Afghans, had they investigated, might have assumed they were being hacked by the Chinese. Thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, however, it now appears that the Equation Group was in fact the NSA. “It doesn’t take much to leave a trail of bread crumbs to whichever government you want to blame for an attack,” Carr pointed out.

Supporters of Donald Trump, together with the FBI, accuse Leftist Maoist China of hacking and releasing throughout the election inflammatory but TRUE information about Donald Trump thereby purportedly providing narrow margins of victory to Hillary Clinton in key states.

Same Trump supporters set about trying to figure out a way to flip the allotted electors to keep the Maoist Clinton from being inaugurated, and are successful.

As a leftist/liberal/progressive in America, do you just sit back on your haunches howling and crying into your microbrew or cappuccino and just let Donald Trump’s supporters upend the initial electoral college results, and flip a bunch of electors post election to ultimately seat Trump as POTUS instead, or because he won the popular vote?

I seriously doubt it. That’s what’s at stake here. You delegitimize and steal an election from your fellow citizens, who followed the rules, and won under the rules both candidates (parties) agreed to, and you might as well assume America is done and there will be massive bloodshed if not Civil War in the streets of America.

That’s what we’re talking about in trying to do something foolish like prevent Trump from being rightfully inaugurated via some sort of “electors gambit”. Has never before happened in America and I hope to hell it doesn’t happen now. Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, and anyone suggesting it is borderline delusional and un-American.

If Donald Trump and the GOP attempts to suspend the rule of law, future elections or impose martial law, they’ll be plenty of time for a civil war in the streets of America. But until then we are obligated as Americans to peacefully abide by the legitimate election results that our fellow citizens obtained on behalf of their preferred candidate, and then push back with every legal tool at our disposal, organizing and civil disobedience if necessary to stop the worst of his and the GOPs agenda. But that’s as good as it gets, so you should get your brains wrapped around that before something really bad happens trying to dick around with legitimate election results because some people don’t like or fear who your fellow citizens elected.

That’s the only way America has ever worked, or ever will work. And if you don’t understand that you have zero business being an American.

see what i mean?
the plan B has to be prescribed and in place prior to events that would take America into a darker place.
Call the convention. Re-declare independence. Upgrade the constitution. Implement it. And change the currency system. Until then, everything else is just a patch on a mummified system.

rr, what you said was perfect. What will happen in future elections? The oligarchy will get to determine(even more than they already do) who wins, because the votes of the citizens will have become essentially meaningless. If the party elites somehow come up with someone who is not acceptable to the banks and the war profiteers, and that person wins, there are seventeen fucking intelligence agencies in the US who can come up with some bullshit reason to throw aside the vote for the sake of the oligarchs.

I think martial law is more than just a possibility here. The police are already militarized, and the oil barons and others would welcome the ability to crush dissent surrounding pipelines and the environment.

rr- Now throw into your model the FACTS that in several key state elections (MI, PA & WI) the margins of victory determining electoral vote are so thin that a few questionable and illegal factors likely changed the outcome of the vote… documented malfunctioning voting machines which are not allowed to be examined (PA), laws prohibiting recount in precincts where any irregularities appear (MI) and a plethora of blocks to monitoring and recounting in WI… Wouldn’t the Trumpsters be justified in raising hell and calling for monitored revotes with transparent tallying?
If that were the case we all know, based on what has been threatened by Trump and his supporters, that they’d be in the streets calling for civil war and insurrection.

Very good comments.
Might I point out however, that the fix was in for HRC,by MSM media manipulation,slander and demonization of Trump as never before in our history,a full throated cacophony of BS right up to election day,so the Trump partisans would have had very legitimate reasons for anger,unlike this contrived BS from our actual democracy manipulator zion,the real foreign influence on US.
A rather different scenario.
And haven’t post election events proven the absolute disaster she would have been,with her backroom post election crap,and her total lack of denunciation of the twisted anti democratic narrative being put before US?
An evil pos.

Yes, he is a power house, and important to support and share/publicize his work. (unfortunately the troll/comments usually are not quite up to the quality of GG)…anyway, as MSM is completely corrupted.. think we do need to OCCUPY the MEDIA… create and share well founded and documented information… and if possible, meaningful dialogue (not troll vs troll) would be good… see our little addition here-“OCCUPY THE MEDIA” https://youtu.be/d2xnms84N3c Please share, subscribe, like, etc! Discussion of some of the best alternative progressive media sources. Please add in comments your own recommendations.

There’s a more involved, wide-ranging story here. It’s not just the recent curtailment and evisceration of constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights under Bush and Obama, McCarthyism of the past, and now this newest iteration of McCarthyism that is part of how civil liberties in the U.S. have historically suffered specifically due to mass hysteria (which then justifies all kinds of transgressions). There is also the instructive story of Japanese-Americans being “interned” during WWII. Their story exemplifies how recklessly those who are entrusted with protecting the Constitution eschew critical, ethical, moral and legal reasoning for expediency sake. In the case of Japanese-Americans, 120, 000 innocent people lost all their belongings and were put in, what amounted to, prisons. I’ve personally heard the stories from survivors, and none of them (nor anybody else to my knowledge) was ever convicted of anything. They were merely victims of innuendo and guilt by association. So much for due process.

To be sure, being entrusted with securing the safety of a nation is an onerous task. But, we should ask, Were there really no other alternatives, or does this decision, as well as others, typify an attitude among some that Constitutionally-enshrined rights are essentially optional and dispensing with them is just more convenient? Moreover, we should be asking whether or not we have learned from history, or if we are once again now going down a slippery slope? But by far the most important question is, When will this nation begin practicing what it preaches, whether it’s treating people with the inalienable rights they supposedly have, or not meddling in others’ internal affairs? We are no shining example to hold up to others and we wreak of hypocrisy. Unfortunately, the dictum “might makes right” is what still rules the day: a rather Neanderthalian consciousness that is the bane of civilized man.

Glenn, why not initiate some serious investigative efforts regarding the DNC hacks? After all, you could start with your contacts in Wikileaks and your friend Assange in London. I think these hacks are the cyber equivalent of Watergate. In this case, the principals could be the Trump/Republican campaign operatives, the Russian/East European hackers working for Putin, and the distributor Wikileaks. Of course, there was likely an internal mole inside the DNC who provided access. (Means, Motive, & Opportunity?)

Trump fan, hillfarmer, is anxious to see The Washington Post prosecuted for purportedly publishing pieces that are “the geopolitical [equivalent] of yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded room.” As with most commentary on free speech or a free press from Trump or his supporters, this authoritarian is nonsense.

Lawyer Ken White has addressed pro-censorship arguments many times and in many contexts. The hackneyed “fire in a theater” garbage turns up from many lazy minds. As White writes, my emphasis:

Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said”[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

That flourish — now usually shortened to “shout fire in a crowded theater” — is the media’s go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it’s empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court’s strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It’s an old tool, but still useful, versatile enough to be invoked as a generic argument for censorship whenever one is needed. But it’s null-content, because all it says is some speech can be banned — which, as we’ll see in the next trope, is not controversial. The phrase does not advance a discussion of which speech falls outside of the protection of the First Amendment.

yeabut – we are at war, always at war now. The british spyguy has declared that Russian actions are a threat to Britain. Hillary has just as well deemed Russia to be an enemy of the state. And the WAPO is acting in a subversive fashion as if to pair up the President Elect as a Russian spy.

WHA!?
This whole russia-did-it thing is conjured madness by the CIA attempting to influence a US election except that it is much worse than they are pretending the Russians did.
And btw, i understand the whole operation was taken from a panned hollywood script found in a trashcan at Hillary’s hollywood fundraiser by a staffer who plucked it out thinking it was a discarded email list. However when the staffer examined it, it was a script with a working title which by co-incidence was called “RUSSIA DID IT”. So he took it up the ladder and figured they could use it as a PlanB if Hillary lost. Needed some prep work by the CIA in advance, like email hacking etc. Hillary lost and that triggered what they co-incidentally code named “operation russia did it”.

if my surmisation is co-incidentally correct they will be knocking on my door.

When Trump declined to say whether he would accept the election results, a Clinton supporter said to me “We teach our children to lose graciously, but this man-baby is prepared to throw a tantrum.”

I pointed this out to her today, and pointed out that by her reckoning Hillary is being a “woman-baby” about the results. She responded that Hillary isn’t doing this personally, to which I replied “Oh, her supporter-babies, then.” At this juncture she went red in the face and said she understood why my boyfriend left me (actually he didn’t – I dumped him).

Over the weekend, Allen West posted to his 2.5 million Facebook followers a picture of Marine Gen. James Mattis, on which was the text, “Fired by Obama to please the Muslims” at the top, and “Hired by Trump to exterminate them,” on the bottom. (West eventually blamed a member of his staff. Oh well, even if true, that’s ok then.)

[West is] actively summiting with Team Trump, and his much-visited Facebook page is now trafficking in material promoting the mass slaughter of Muslim people.

On Monday, West (a one-term congressman who was previously pushed out of the U.S. Army after allegedly firing his gun near the head of a prisoner he was interrogating) again stopped by Trump Tower. He had visited the Tower earlier this month to meet Vice President-elect Mike Pence and incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to discuss ways West could potentially “continue to serve” his country, according to West.

White supremacists dream of global genocide on a massive scale. That seems unusual for race-based movements. There are people who say white identity is just like any other ethnic identity, so there’s no cause for concern. But history shows that’s not the case. Plus they have books like the Turner Diaries. What’s the equivalent in other races, written in the modern era?

Before anyone says I’m claiming whites are genetically predisposed to global genocide, I’m not. The key differentiation is power and maintaining that power.

in other words, whats the matter with white people.
they are control freaks, a widely inherited affliction (mental disorder).
these types gravitate towards power like filings to a magnet.
then comes the hierarchy order and the insect colony madness.
it always gets worse from there.

“The common tactic of advanced hackers is that they route the cyber attack through many different countries. Under these circumstances, a global policy on cyber attacks is need that will track down accurately the origin and perpetrator to be tracked down accurately. However, such a global policy is highly unlikely because of the differences among the great cyber powers. Even though the future of attributing cyber acts appears uncertain, there is hope that someday, somehow the real identity of the online villains will be uncovered and they will be brought to justice.”

note: Please read the references…they are all relevant to the subject matter. I won’t list them all here, but they are all linked as a reference links at the end of the article

CTO at cyber security firm eSentire, Mark McArdle said: “While CrowdStrike’s reported evidence and observations seem like a reasonable conclusion to reach, we cannot dismiss the fact that none of this evidence is 100% reliable.

“If we think about the very high level of design, engineering, and testing required for such a sophisticated attack, is it reasonable to assume that the attacker would leave behind these breadcrumbs? Yes, it’s possible, but it’s also possible that these things can be used to misdirect attention to a different party. Is this evidence the result of sloppiness, or careful misdirection?”

“Different types of attribution require different levels of evidence. In the Sony case, we saw the US government was able to generate enough evidence to convince itself. Perhaps it had the additional evidence required to convince North Korea it was sure, and provided that over diplomatic channels. But if the public is expected to support any government retaliatory action, they are going to need sufficient evidence made public to convince them. Today, trust in US intelligence agencies is low, especially after the 2003 Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle.”

“Without good network forensics, investigation usually uses circumstantial evidence, like encoding languages and the code itself. Sometimes this really helps?—?sometimes organization or people leave their name in the malware. But often people do remember to remove their name from malware, or stick the names of people they want to fuck with in there. As for language encoding, if you go into your computer’s settings right now, you can change your encoding language to be Chinese, or Korean. Congrats! You’re now only a malware search away from getting your hacking attributed to a nation-state.”

“Attack attribution is complicated in cyberspace, and journalists are right to be skeptical of any official attribution. In some cases, the forensics makes it relatively easy to identify attackers. In other cases, it’s impossible. The deciding factors are generally the technical skill of the attacker and the attributor. It is possible to “false flag” attacks. That is, to make them appear to come from somewhere they’re not. There are also instances where only the pervasive internet eavesdropping capabilities of the NSA allow us to attribute an attack, and in those instances the details of that attribution will remain secret.

In every case, though, it is far easier to attribute an attacker to a particular region or computer than to a person or organization. For example, it can be impossible to know if a particular attack from China is state-sponsored, done by a hacking organization with the tacit approval of the Chinese government, or done by a lone hacker without the government’s knowledge. Recently, Yahoo claimed that their massive hack was “state sponsored.” It wasn’t, but the claim was their way to claim that the attackers were very sophisticated, and that the press shouldn’t blame them for their shoddy security.”

“When French TV station TV5Monde was hacked and almost destroyed in April 2015, CyberCaliphate claimed responsibility. Since it had an established presence this was at first accepted as the likely explanation. A few months later FireEye found that an IP address associated with Sofacy had been used, and blame switched from CyberCaliphate to Sofacy (and by implication, Russia). Kaspersky believes, however, that CyberCaliphate and Sofacy are the same group.

“It is believed,” write Guerrero-Saade and Bartholomew, “that CyberCaliphate was created to provide the Sofacy actors a way to conduct psychological operations against certain targets of interest while providing a level of plausible deniability.” Given that Russia has sided with the Syrian government against ISIS, it is far from an automatic assumption to describe CyberCaliphate as Russia.

In fact, Kaspersky also links CyberBerkut and the Yemen Cyber Army groups to Sofacy. The unspoken danger is that if the identity of one hacking group can be misrepresented as a false flag, then so could any hacking group”

Circumstantial evidence
“Attribution is a curious beast,” says Morgan Marquis-Boire, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and former member of Google’s security team. “There are a variety of techniques that you can use to make educated assertions about the nature of an attack.” These include examining the sophistication of the tools involved, the techniques, the type of data stolen and where it was sent. “I call this strong circumstantial, and this is how a lot of the attribution is done in public malware reports.”

The more informed you become about the very nature of how attribution is performed…or examined…or asserted..or assumed…then you get a more robust scope of how attribution is certainly not a transparent or even reliable means to falsify information.

Now, there is this one single constant that all of these articles I have listed and read (there were many more): that the NSA (and other state level spy agencies) has “tools” that permit absolute attibution results. But these are protected secrets.

I am not opposed to protecting national security secrets. Get that.

I AM opposed to erecting and standing up foreign policy, sanctions and public accusations, based on protected state secrets. Fundamentally, it is the MOST dangerous behavior with all of the predictable outcomes you can ever imagine. tyranny..politization of security…corruptions…criminality..etc.

Draw your own conclustions, but here are mine, based on a principle:

extraordinary claims, DEMAND extraordinary evidence.

Our Govt must establish some level of transparency about its discovery methods….

The reality of this situation is that if the govt refuses to accept this responsibility and let loose the methods and the science that supports these attributions…then this is what will happen next:

hackers and state nations will, for right or wrong,will target the US (and others who perform the same secrecy) and publish all of these so called secrets.

you either do this and earn the confidence, or you get slam dunked by an adversary who will in all likelihood damage the trust in the american “system” more than a voluntary release would endanger.

and that is something to really be concerned about…because that is where this is going to lead.

When our intelligence community will have its back broken….with zero public support, or even nation state support…what level of danger is more than this?

so who goes first?

that is the most important question about attribution science and openness.

greenwald:Even as Democrats have spent months issuing one hysterical claim after the next about Russian interference, the White House, and Obama specifically, have been very muted about all of this. Perhaps that’s because he did not want to appear partisan or be inflammatory,

The history of faithless electors is meager. There’s not even a cult appreciation (or vilification) of faithless electors.

We live in an unimaginative self-repressed political culture (as proven by Clinton and Trump’s respective party popularity and near neglect of “lower” elections)
So, my assessment is:
1. few electors will go faithless on Trump.
2. if enough will, then the Trump defectors will choose Pence.
3. assuming Pence “wins” EC, the benefit will be in only foreign relations. Domestic governance will lurch toward to totalitarianism in roughly equal amount as would under Trump.

The Democrats have self-destructed as with the oligarchs in the establishment GOP. They don’t understand that their iron grip on information where they had used it as a weapon against the people they represented has collapsed. This is why they are in a full pressed court going against the President elect. I am not a Trump supporter nor did I vote for him but I am against a corrupt oligarch that has hijacked our federal govt causing illegal wars overseas and now trying to undermine our election results.

In fabricating these blatantly false and malicious news stories, the Washington Post is not engaged in journalism or an “expression of free speech.” This degree of news fakery and malicious interference with the election is, ironically, exactly what the Post ridiculously accuses Russia of doing. Publishing this brand of falsified information that carries such game-changing ramifications for the outcome of a democratic election is the geopolitical equipment of yelling “fire” in a crowded room

40-50% of Americans who don’t bother to vote at all that is interesting to me.
And how many don’t register?
Most of those people will never become interested. Many others will lack interest during decades of their lives.

also means they are going to have to jettison (or have it electorally beaten out of them) their present understanding and policies consistent with neoliberal economics, and get back to something more akin to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights (and that is mutually self-reinforcing with “civil rights” for all of America’s minority or historically disadvantaged groups/identities)
I’ll assume that “neoliberal economics” in the non-theoretical sense is the same as our current “bipartisan” oligarch-rigged commerce.
1970s OPEC – primarily led by the Saudis – price manipulations created illusory 1980s “success” of “Reaganomics”, inducing conservative response by the electorate.
During the 1980s, the “centrist” Democrats partially adopted neoliberal economics for electoral survival .

Now seen as 1990s archetype, the Clintons advanced politically in the geographic and generational center of now electorally obsolete centrist Democratic (national) politics.

there was no-one to vote for – with voter suppression and 42% of the people not voting. The election would have been very different. I will repeat what I say about the 42% . . It is your RIGHT..
It is your civic responsibility. . and IT IS YOUR DUTY . . . I did not get up to stand in line to be number 5 in voting . . . but it gives me the right to B*tch and Moan about your not voting – your non vote is the reason for the outcome – you should be ashamed of yourself…….

Well, I don’t know where you’re going with this, Glenn, but if you think I’m going to sit-by and tolerate some kind of ‘redo-over’, along with 2 or 3 more years of Trump / Clinton debate and analysis, … well, I’d rather be ‘blind, crippled and crazy.’

*if I had a Twitter, I’d pin that tweet there … under the #hue&cry hashtag.

The Washington Post has demonstrated it is a clear and present national security threat to the United States of America. They’ve gone beyond their usual news fakery and have now decided to actively work against the interests of democracy

HRC was sunk by many factors, including:
about 3 times free big-media time for Trump/Pence than for Clinton/Kaine. (Hours of free media time is hundreds of times the hours of paid media, though their infection routes aren’t identical.)
de rigueur redstate Republican election fraud, concentrated in swing states. (demonstrated in exit poll discrepancy trends)
weak candidate appeal left unbolstered by the campaign, in the desperate coal/rust states (notoriously abused and neglected by illegitimately dominant state level Republicans).

and timing of:
comeygate
the annual ACA rate announcements.

If they “lost” because of leaked emails, etc. it is not the “fault” of leakers but of the contents of those communications by the writers.
The Podesta mails “contents” was a load of mostly nothing, spiced with a little normal (smelly) insider political planning.
The contents were far from being “extraordinary/bold evidence” of anything else.

The leakers scheduled the leaks for maximum gorging, and highlighted strings in the initial view to maximize “scandal!” response.

The mails served as fuel for Bannon operation’s lies (fake news). These were eagerly swallowed (and embellished) by a small but electorally significant percentage of useful idiots who are currently obsessed with “pizzagate” and reposting “dank memes” of crying infants.
Among the mails posted, were at least one hoax (Wikileaks search found nothing, then I found the hoax by a web search.)

None of this can constitutionally be squelched by laws. Voters must learn to fend for themselves.

One has to ask, with the CIA, etc. now so politicized, what is their real value to American security? Given all of the past blowback and scandals (and assassinations) they have on their record, why not just abolish these thuggish liar agencies?
“now so politicized”?
Survival of a nation requires a breadth of means of national defense. We must accept and manage those means. The Constitution provides skeletal design for much of that.
Human nature tells us that the management will always be politicized.

Time to drain that swamp too.
Bannon is building “the best swamp, believe me”.

Also for example of hard science, read on how long the cold fusion hoax went along.

When does research end regarding rare medical procedures?

Assertions that the Russians had deliberate acts to influence the US election is a bold claim.

Define “bold”.
Generally, the value in influencing politics in other countries is obvious.
Specifically now, we can conclude that Sanders was least desirable President for Putin to face, followed closely by any other Democrat or any of the politically experienced Republican candidates. A Johnson administration also would have been wily enough to deal with Putin.
Inn contrast, a collaborating shrewd malcontent such as Bannon combined with Trump as his puppet is “deliciously” rare to Putin.

So where is the bold evidence? Nada, zilch.
Define “bold”.

Instead we have formerly semi respectable Beltway mouthpiece newspapers (one, WaPo) passing out garbage so thin and silly that it appears to be an amateur hour disinformation project. The right question to ask about these supposed “intelligence community” consensus claims is this: why can’t or shouldn’t these spooks provide something credible as evidence for these extreme claims? What is the risk of “sources and methods” here? Of course the blanket response is “we can’t say or the bad guys will learn our methods, etc.”

There is no benefit in releasing details of the methods. Both RU, US, UK, DE and other nations’ agencies and academics are conceptually familiar with any data analysis methods.

Silly and absurd. If Russian intel was involved, would not they already be informed that the CIA, etc. have penetrated their operation here? Would they not already be back tracing their op to sanitize it?

It is similar to claiming that “we broke the XYZ military code” but won’t say how we did it. The important thing here is that the code was broken, not how it was done. The XYZ code will be changed.
?? IJK??

Well it is accurate to say that “cold fusion” as purported by Pons and Fleischmann’s experiment could not be reproduced, and I suppose if you want to label that a “hoax” then that’s up to you.

But clearly “fusion” is real as evidenced by the Sun.

The LENR question is can “fusion” be achieved at lower temperatures than how the Sun does it.

Now I have my doubts, as do the vast majority of scientists, but doesn’t mean it is “impossible” just incredibly improbable.

Seems to me it is a waste of research dollars given the physics hurdles, when that money should be going to how to simply harness near inexhaustible “clean energy” sources like solar, wind and tidal movements. All with their own problems but infinitely more viable as clean energy sources than “cold fusion”.

The CIA has been out-of-control since Harry Truman permitted the former OSS to import “moderate” Nazis via Operation Paperclip completely tax and duty-free to organize the Central “Intelligence” Agency that seems to be almost always wrong about almost everything. (“Go ahead an invade Russia in the winter; there is never any snow on the ground and it will be warm and sunny.”)

Now the open warfare between the CIA and the President-Elect over the totally evidence-free allegations that Russia had anything to do with influencing the late election — besides being a punching bag for the former SecState and her gopher and pundit chorus — is a sign of the most clear and present danger to the Republic ever posed by this dangerous and error-prone agency.

Perhaps the CIA is miffed that the President-Elect hasn’t agreed to “The Kennedy Briefing” in which autopsy photos and other memorabilia of John F, Kennedy’s blown-off skull are shown to him as a sort of “offer he can’t refuse.” That should shut the mouth of the President-Elect, shouldn’t it?

And no wonder Mr. Nixon did not attack the intelligence community; first, the diplomatic skullduggery on Vietnanistan that Mr. Nixon and his operatives did prior to the 1968 election was flat, rank, treason let alone illegal, i.e. the First Watergate; second, that was only five years after Mr. Kennedy’s blood and brain tissue was scattered all over the southeast bound end of westbound Elm Street in downtown Dallas — after Mr. Kennedy repeatedly refused CIA and Pentagon demands that he start a shooting war somewhere, that he let them stage an off-the-shelf “9-11″ to justify an invasion of Cuba (Operation Northwoods), or that he be a jolly good fellow and let them start an all-out nuclear was with the Soviet Union (i.e. Russia) for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.

The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy’s June, 1963 “Peace Speech” to American University (which nobody knows about and is NOT taught in schools or on The History Channel), and August’s one-vote defeat of Medicare in the Senate must have caused further consternation to various warlike, nuclear-armed tribal cultures in Washington.

The recent open warfare between the (appointed) war criminal CIA Reichsfuehrer John Brennan and the (elected) U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein over the Senate Torture Report showed total insubordination on the part of Brennan and the CIA countenanced by the milquetoast half-white president, and these CIA attacks on the President-Elect might suggest that the Secret Service tighten security. A lot.

As about Russia conducting the hacking, I could have hacked John Podesta’s account as well as the others and uploaded the goldmine to WikiLeaks. The fault lies not in the stars but in themselves: SOLELY in THEIR FAILURE to use adequate, robust, coded passwords instead of “ILOVEMYDOG” to protect their accounts.

The use of easily hackable passwords may well have been inspired by the reckless use of an unsecured private email server in a private residence located in Chautauqua, New York by their heroine, the former SecState.

Engaging in armed rebellion, for whatever reason, against the entrenched government of a nation is an all or nothing proposition. And if you do it, win or lose, you’re going to be, in part (directly or indirectly), responsible for a lot of non-combatant fatalities.

A government and its forces only has one of two choices when a rebellion starts–attempt to destroy it completely, or capitulate immediately and flee. The latter rarely happens unless the entrenched government is incredibly weak, or has lost every bit of legitimacy among its citizens. Armed rebellion, for the defeated and those non-combatants around them, doesn’t usually work out as well as it did for the South in the American Civil War which is the exception rather than rule when it comes to armed rebellion (and that’s not arguing there wasn’t a lot of horrific death all the way around in the American Civil War–quite the opposite, but South and its people were “spared” in many respects). Syria is a prime example of that rule rather than the exception.

Tragic nonetheless for the people of Syria. Maybe America should think long an hard about meddling in others affairs particularly when it is in another global rival power’s longstanding “sphere of influence.”

And it should be a lesson in what would happen if America ever sought to attempt to incite armed rebellion or actively militarily intervene (whether through proxies or American forces) to destabilize Iran or oust its regime.

Iran has more than 3X as many people as Syria and roughly 10X as large geographically. And its government is way better armed and its people prepared to unify to fight any invader or group of armed rebels. And America, Israel or anybody who thinks they could militarily overthrow it in the absence of using nuclear weapons, or that Russia would sit idly by while it happens, is a neocon lunatic of the highest order.

I’m happy that I’m apparently smarter than you and less of a hypocrite. At least you’ve appeared to lose IQ points and reasoning abilities since this most recent election, which makes me unhappy because I used to have some respect for your comments and opinions.

Maybe, and hopefully, it’s just temporary and you’ll return to your senses.

I’ve never argued Trump was “fit” to be President. But the US Constitution permits the people, and electors of the electoral college, to install whomever they choose assuming enough commoners vote for that particular candidate.

You ready to throw out the Constitution based on your fear of your fellow citizens or who they voted for in greater numbers than you and your compatriots voted for? I’m not, because that path leads to immediate ruin.

I’m pretty sure we don’t want it any other way, because that’s just really saying something akin to “well the losers of an election (people like Milton) know what’s best or better than what their fellow citizens believe is best or better, and who just exercised their democratic right to vote in sufficient numbers that exceeded those of people like Milton and those similarly minded.”

Either convince a sufficient number of people to vote for your preferred candidate or don’t. But when you don’t you don’t get to figure out some clever argument for why you couldn’t and didn’t.

Like I said, I used to respect your opinion, but if you think overturning this election through some technical use of the electors of the electoral college, or even a re-vote isn’t going to split this country in half and likely start a civil war, then you’re deluded.

Like I said, I used to respect your opinion, but if you think overturning this election through some technical use of the electors of the electoral college, or even a re-vote isn’t going to split this country in half and likely start a civil war, then you’re deluded.

Don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t tell me what I think.

So far I don’t have a good solution to inaugurating an unfit president.

I suspect better minds than mine are trying to figure out ways to do that. And others also figuring out how to get this moron inaugurated so that he can be assassinated in favor of Mike Pence (who is more odious than Trump in his own way.)

But lacking a solution doesn’t mean I’m willing to concede reality to the alt-right, Russia, or Washington power brokers.

This is a crisis.

Ignoring it because tradition dictates will not make it go away any more than Chamberlain prevented war by granting ludicrous concessions.

So far I don’t have a good solution to inaugurating an unfit president.

Um how about accept that you don’t get to decide who is/is not “unfit” to be President of the United States of America–a majority of electoral votes does. Full stop. If you can’t handle that reality maybe you should consider becoming a citizen of another country where you Milton Wiltmellow gets to decide for everyone is is/is not fit to have a legitimate vote cast for them by those legally empowered to vote.

I suspect better minds than mine are trying to figure out ways to do that.

Well if by “better” you mean as dumb as you in trying to find a way to overturn the results of a legitimately conducted election (and unless you/they can demonstrate individual ballots in sufficient numbers had been tampered with, or the counting of said ballots was tampered with, then you/they have got fuck all to complain about except you don’t like the result of the democratic process.)

And others also figuring out how to get this moron inaugurated so that he can be assassinated in favor of Mike Pence (who is more odious than Trump in his own way.)

Yeah that will really end well for America.

But lacking a solution doesn’t mean I’m willing to concede reality to the alt-right, Russia, or Washington power brokers.

“Solution” to what problem? That you didn’t like the outcome of an election in America? Sad to say that’s the history of America in every election. In every single election there was and likely always will be some percentage of the voting (and non-voting) population that is fundamentally opposed to the result. But if you honestly believe that figuring out a way to “solve” the problem of elections that don’t result in what you want, other than accepting them as the will of your fellow citizens, then you better be prepared for the consequences of that decision or actions.

This is a crisis.

The only “crisis” is if some idiots aligned with the Democratic party attempt to overturn this election result. You and anyone who agrees with that “plan” will have to answer directly to the almost as many millions of your fellow citizens that actually voted for the result that was obtained.

Ignoring it because tradition dictates will not make it go away any more than Chamberlain prevented war by granting ludicrous concessions.

Like I said, I’m really convinced this election is causing otherwise reasonably intelligent people to lose significant IQ points and their ability to reason based on nothing more than pants-wetting fear.

And while I may generally be aligned with your ultimate policy goals for this nation, if you or anybody else attempts to overturn an election that was electorally sound (as a function of ballot integrity and ballot counts) then we’ll probably become enemies when the shit hits the fan. Because if you believe or trust so little in the electoral process and giving your fellow citizens the rightful fruits of their votes (that exceed you and yours) then you don’t have a functioning democratic or representative form of government in the first instance–you’ll have proved the “right’s” fears of a “leftist tyranny” because that’s what it’ll be in fact.

You and everybody else is going to have to suck it up, put on your big-boy/girl pants of resistance and fight back against what’s coming from Trump and the GOP. But you will never “solve” anything by likely sparking another civil war in this country by overturning a valid election. So get your fear in check before you embarrass yourself and contribute to something way worse than cuts to SS payments.

And I’ve never tried to argue against your opinion that Trump is unfit. Hell I agree with it. But, hey, beautiful strawman, which seems to be your stock in trade since the election. Oh yeah and your opinion that Trump is “unfit”.

What I’m arguing against is your implicit assumption in everything you write lately that there is a “crisis” because he is “unfit”, or that because he is “unfit” in your opinion, he does not or should not be permitted to be inaugurated.

At least be intellectually honest with yourself to admit that’s what you’re arguing.

If you’re arguing he is “unfit”, all I have to say is “so fucking what”. Millions of voters agreed with you, including me. But they lost, and he won.

Get the fuck over with it, and stop with this dissembling, posturing, whining and positing how it might be possible that “better minds than yours” could or are trying to figure out a way to stop him from being inaugurated.

Because to even suggest that is an “actual crisis” and would lead to something incredibly stupid and likely violent. And it is anti-democratic as hell. And despite your recent stupidity I never took you for someone who was so cowardly and frightened of your fellow citizens that you’d actually condone something that you seem to be explicitly or implicitly advocating even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself by saying, “I’m just arguing he’s unfit.” Well great, that and $3.50 will get you a cup of expensive coffee and nothing more.

And I’ve never tried to argue against your opinion that Trump is unfit. Hell I agree with it. But, hey, beautiful strawman, which seems to be your stock in trade since the election. Oh yeah and your opinion that Trump is “unfit”.

If this is a true statement (I think it is) and not some sort of evasion designed to gallop to whatever you want to say, then I commend you for it.

Trump is unfit to be president.

Repeat it. Adopt it. Nurture it. Hold it to your heart like a pain that still hurts after decades.

Here in America, besides packaging and poisons, propaganda and sales pitches, we produce very little of real value. Here in America there are more lies than landfills to store them in, more lies than words to hide them. More lies than flies on a corpse.

So it seems to me important — of utmost importance — to tell a truth.

The barista at your expensive coffee place says to you, “Hi rr. How are you?” You can give the greasy answer everyone expects … a lie.

“I’m fine Marcy. How are you?”

Instead imagine yourself saying, “Donald Trump is unfit to be president. So I’m not fine because I don’t know what to do about it.”

Marcy may give you a funny look. She may yell, “GET THE HELL OUT.” She may whisper, “I agree … but my boyfriend starts yelling at me if I say it.” Probably she’ll say, “grande or lenti, light or dark roast, room for cream?”

And yes, a tininess nested in a smallness, hidden by nonsense, covered by futility, like nested dolls at the center of which is absolutely nothing. The sun still rises in the east.

But I say you’ve changed the world — even in such a tiny way. You’ve said something true.

Wouldn’t you feel better?

You don’t have to waste your time arguing with presumable allies over actual strawmen arguments like “WP is the new McCarthyism” or “Clinton lost because …” or “Evidence, dammit, EVIDENCE! …” or anything except that which you hold to be true.

Some people think truth should be painted gold and slapped on buildings or uttered in front of cameras or written in a bestselling memoir.

I think not.

I think truth like a candle that wards off the darkness. Humble, yes. Insufficient, maybe. Forgetable, definitely. Still there’s lots to complain about, but at least it’s something — and that is far better than nothing.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper began asking Vice President-elect Mike Pence about connections between the Trump transition team and Michael G. Flynn, the son of the incoming national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn.

The younger Mr. Flynn had recently used Twitter to legitimize the false story that the Clintons and their allies were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington. He did so hours after a man stormed the place with an AR-15 assault rifle in search of the nonexistent sex ring.

…

Mr. Pence had said on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” that the younger Mr. Flynn had “no involvement in the transition whatsoever,” and that was that.

…

But, it turned out, the younger Mr. Flynn was in fact aiding his father on the transition — at least until later that day, when President-elect Donald J. Trump put an end to it. And, CNN was reporting, the transition team had even sought to get Mr. Flynn’s son a security clearance, for access to sensitive information.

…

And so it went eight times, as Mr. Tapper repeated the question and Mr. Pence accused him of pursuing “a distraction” and tried to change the subject. “I want to move on to other issues,” Mr. Tapper told him, “but I’m afraid I just didn’t get an answer.”

The headline is messed up, however. What Tapper does should be standard for journalists in every era, not just that of Trump.

Ah,the pizza story that has disappeared from our intrepid medias headlines,right after the gunmans shooting,and the story came out he was an actor.Hmmm…..
And why would serial liars not run with something that enforces their fake news propaganda?
Oh yeah,Jake Tapper,of the Clinton News Network,is Walter Cronkite’s ghost.
And why anyone would give obvious murderers and anti democratic scum as the Clinton campaigns losers credence about anything is hillaryous.
You creepy.

I’ve never thought of it that way but yes you are correct he is Walter Cronkite’s ghost. He appears so serious and sincere yet you know he’s just so full of shit and another shill for the party. His rise to fame and power was orchestrated perfectly with the hard questions asked during press conferences at the White House to gain exposure and legitimacy only to be propelled by his puppet masters to his own show on the Clinton news network how convenient. This game is so easily deciphered with just a little clarity and common sense.

Seattle local news mentioned last night that Trump is to meet with tech giants from Silicon Valley.
One conspicuous absence will be Jeff Bezos. The commentator noted, “Bezos owns the WaPo and it was critical of Trump during the election.”

“…….It’s called EYEWITNESS TESTIMONEY……..Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”……..”

How does Murray know it was THE person? Was he there? That particular person could be anyone that Assange dragged out of the streets. In fact, it could just be a diversionary tactic designed to divert attention away from Assange’s connection to Russian intelligence. Russian intelligence and Assange had motives – and vehemently opposed HRC.

Craig Murray is an anti-American political hack – like Assange. The “insider” needs to come forward for an interview by law enforcement officials for this story to gain any credibility.

I really don’t believe that is a realistic possibility. The real story from the hacker would have been that this was CIA sponsored which, of course, it was never reported. If the CIA sponsored it, they would have at least provided a hacker with a Russian accent, you think?

Not even one shred of evidence unless you take my word for it that Russia hacked the DNC. Do you have any evidence that the job was an inside job (possibly a KGB plant) besides the word of a radical anti-American leftist that believes he is a human rights activist while supporting the destruction of Aleppo?

a larger implication is that “if” the perpetrator is established…finally and convincingly…what becomes of the illusions of attribution and the state of the intelligence agencies that not only got it so wrong, but probably in all likelihood was an intentional mistake.

I think that outcome is what people deserve to notice.

as far as this former ambassador, I place his claims in the same department as the “official statement” released by the intelligence 3 letter groups:

heresay, innuendo and assertions not backed up by any evidence that can be proven one way or the other.

so, we should be careful transforming his comment as anything more than just same bullshit, different space.

I think critically, there are at least two specifics that need to be captured to get to truths:

1. do citizens support policies based on secretive protected methods? That have been proven ineffective and even manipulated in the past?

2. Where is the open source peer review that established wide acceptance of the statements made of a russian -putin link with full disclosure of the techniques that can be repeated for proper scientific proofing?

again, we should not hold ANY person that attempts to establish some credibility about attribution here based on mouth service and story telling.

isn’t that what we learned with the fake news and msm problems made clear in this last cycle?

power play.
ok – let’s assume the CIA is using Russia as bait and threatening to overturn the election and if the leaker does not come forward, all his/her efforts to reveal facts about a criminal (Hillary) are for naught.

IF the leaker comes forward, will the dems not continue to attempt to overturn the election anyway?
IF the leaker does not come forward, are the dems going to actually follow thru to attempt to overturn the election of is this just a ploy to flush out a leaker?

This IS what the CIA does for a living. And NOW they are doing this in the USofA. IF that is the play, the the democracy in America really is a fake.

“…….FYI, even if the leaker comes foward, SO WHAT. That doesn’t disqualify ANY of the information made public. In fact, NO ONE is disputing the authenticity of the released documents…….”

I am not disputing the information released. I am just not going to take the word of a far left wing anti-American wack-job that it was an inside job. The guy simply has to come forward if Murray’s story is to be corroborated. Jesus. Why is that so hard for you to understand? That is the idea behind this Greenwald article. At some point in the future, you might be able to say see I told you so, but you can’t now until the hacker/leaker comes forward.

I am just not going to take the word of a far left wing anti-American wack-job

And this is probably the reason for Craig’s anti-Murray burp:

Murray was summoned to the FCO in London and on 8 March 2003 was reprimanded for writing to his employers, in response to a speech by President of the United States George W. Bush criticising human rights violations by Saddam Hussein, that “when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora. Double standards? Yes.”[15] The human rights abuses were worse in Uzbekistan than in Iraq, thought Murray in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, but the latter was being invaded while the government of the former was being supported.[16]

No, it was actually the statement by Murray in the link from the galactus post which bothered me.

“……..As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on…….”

He clearly gives the Assad regime a free ride when it comes to barrel bombs, chemical weapons, the death of 25000-50000 prople in Assad detention facilities, targeting of hospitals and civilians – and even the start of the war by Assad who used a military style crackdown on a democracy movement associated with the Arab Spring.

why would the dumb&dumbers suspect Russia of hacking unless of course the dumb&dumbers were aware that their systems were vulnerable? And why would the dumb&dumbers use vulnerable systems?

this hacking stuff would not be a problem if the dumb&dumbers were at least smart enough to use less or unhackable systems – as the NSA does. NSA uses LINUX which includes a code source check prior to entering the microprocessor – very sofisticated and decades old.

au contraire, my friend. Our super-cold weather comes out of the Arctic, through the Yukon, then down the Fraser Canyon before freezing Seattle. The jet stream can cross Siberia to the Arctic and then down to the West Coast. The local weather people made a big deal once about the ‘actual’ Siberian cold-front, many years ago.
A ‘Siberian Cold-front’ in Seattle is, like, temps in the teens … :)

Maybe you would like to outline how you reached your conclusions, and what the basis or source of your assertion is… and why you choose to use insulting language that shuts down dialogue when good American’s of all stripes need to be talking to one another from the heart, seriously, the stakes are too high.

I think the source of the leak should contact The Intercept via secure drop and then encrypted email in order to confirm Craig Murray’s claims. There are probably ways to verify the leaker is who he says he is, without compromising his identity.

The Craig Summers of the world will continue to deny it because, you know, we’re surrounded by secret agents of the Kremlin, but it would be very convincing to most rational observers.

In the wake of the most remarkable presidential election in at least a century, we now face the very real possibility that “We, the People” didn’t actually make the final choice about who will run the executive branch and effectively set national policy for the next four years. Instead, #Election2016 may have been hijacked by former Soviet KGB officer-turned-Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, according to a still-secret assessment produced by my former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency. […]

Bottom line: Obama knew before any other policy maker that the Russian government attempted?—?and possibly succeeded?—?in altering the outcome of an American presidential election to Russia’s (at least theoretical) advantage. So, the obvious and deeply troubling question is this: why did Obama not make the CIA assessment, and all supporting raw intelligence used in its production, public within a day of receiving it?

We need this information made public precisely because if it is true, we do need to revisit this election?—?immediately. Even if President Obama has doubts about the CIA’s case, this issue is too important for him to decide unilaterally to slow-roll the release of this data until his successor has already been chosen. The American public deserves to have the same information Obama and the Congress have on this issue so that, if necessary, we can undo what the Russian government has allegedly done.

Under our system of government, the people who can help us do that are the Electoral College electors, who meet on December 19 in their respective state capitols to cast their votes for president and vice president. Those electors, and the public on whose behalf they will act, deserve to have the full available facts about Russia’s attempts to subvert our political process before they chose who will lead America for the next four years.

Given the above – which I agree with (even if that means milton was wrong about some assumptions about me, which I can live with) – and given a question that was posed to all of us, to wit:

2. If yes, how would you address it?

If all of the above, and if one believes Trump needs to be stopped and/or that Russia is behind his win, then hammering on the doors of your state’s electors would be an actionable thing people could do.

What do you say milton? You been hammering there? Or is it more fun to hammer on people here who largely agree with you about the perils and/or uncertainties, if not exactly on how we got here?

I have multiple problems with Milton’s question and any possible response. And here it goes in no particular order:
1) Even if Russia did hack and leak information re: one candidate or another, if the information leaked wasn’t inaccurate or fabricated, why should there be any consequence to Russia whatsoever i.e. it is an argument that American voters aren’t entitled to know the full unvarnished acts or words of their prospective elected officials and vote accordingly however they choose to give weight to that information. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-transparent two big problems America has in the first instance when it comes to the fundamental relationship between American voters and their political representatives.

2) Given an election that had approximately 120 million votes cast, even if Russia had hacked and leaked information, whether true or untrue, how can you ever establish “causation” that it altered the election result i.e. you can’t unless you interview every single voter who was exposed to that information and somehow attempt to causally separate out that data, the weight each voter gave it, and whether or not that “singular” act or word leaked, was dispositive in that voter voting the way he/she did (which is basically impossible).

3) Notwithstanding 1) and 2), and even if it was proved Russia engaged in “interference”, what is going to be worse for America in the long run a) attempt to use the electoral college to overturn Trump’s election in favor of installing Hillary Clinton (that very well could lead to a civil war in America at worst, and at best fundamentally delegitimize Hillary Clinton’s presidency in every conceivable way particularly in light of the other two branches of government being in GOP hands.)

4) Again, notwithstanding 1) and 2) and the caveat in first sentence of 3) attempting to “retaliate” against Russia in some meaningful way would look like what and how could it possibly be effective: a) economic sanctions haven’t worked against Russia in the past and won’t work in the future, b) military intervention is lunancy, and c) cyber-retaliation could very well lead to military hostilities which would be going down the path of lunacy.

Look this is a very stupid and shortsighted game for the Dems and a few Republicans to be playing.

We aren’t helping in any way except to demand proof from those anonymous officials who are making these outrageous claims. But even if such proof is offered, what does it change as far as options going forward? Nothing, IMHO.

Seems to me the better option, should it be proved that Russia “interfered” and only if proved by disseminating fabricated or inaccurate leaks, is rhetorically denounce it and seek a new international UN regime with enforceable mechanisms to prevent any nation (including US) from interfering in any other nations democratic processes; take the stance that it didn’t change the electoral outcome in US because that can never be proved with any sort of certainty; commit to improving cyber-security in US to prevent this (assuming it can be which is uncertain); and, then move the hell on.

I can see absolutely nothing positive coming from anything other than what I’ve suggested above. America is delusional if it thinks it can “punish” Russia for something like this. And if some segment of America thinks it can undo this election result for Trump on the basis of Russia’s purported interference, the only possible way that isn’t perceived as illegitimate by a big portion of America, is if US officials can provide unassailable evidence of the Russian government’s involvement (highly unlikely) AND prove causation definitively as to America’s election result (impossible) AND ask the American people to re-vote and abide by their wishes one way or the other (and that’s not likely to happen in either even and there is no precedent for it legal or political and will thus be perceived as illegitimate).

Short of being able to prove all of those things, and one segment of America’s population takes concrete steps to overthrow this election and there will be violence in the streets–I’d almost guarantee that. We’d look like the biggest banana Republic in the world and make the Brazilian political class look like pikers.

The American people are in a no-win situation, and should simply make the best of it going forward, and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future as best we can.

Not like this chicken hasn’t finally come home to roost if it is actually definitively established the Russia’s government was directly involved and electoral result causation is established (again, which is impossible–correlation is not causation and polling data at any given point in time, or trends, is not causation).

IMHO, this is a very stupid and short-sighted game for the American people and America’s political leadership to be playing from almost every conceivable angle.

RR — I’m in a contrary mood so I searched your above comment for something with which I could snottily disagree, but alas came up empty. You pretty neatly summarized (better than I could) what I’ve been thinking about the whole Russia kerfuffle.

Back in the 90s the Florida football coach, Steve Spurrier, was sometimes accused of “running up the score,” i.e. aggressively pursuing additional points late in the game when victory was already assured. After one such occasion, a reporter asked the losing Tennessee coach, Phil Fulmer, if he objected to Spurrier’s practice. “No,” said Fulmer, “It’s our job to stop him.”

Likewise it’s our job as a nation to stop other countries from inappropriately involving themselves in our elections. If we’re not up to the task, we shouldn’t complain.

IMHO, this is a very stupid and short-sighted game for the American people and America’s political leadership to be playing from almost every conceivable angle.

That sums up this nation. Playing really stupid games.
As you note, the content of the leaked emails seems to be of little consequence because the Russians are playing on our lawn!!
Th indignation expressed by the pundits on Sunday morning was everywhere; How should we respond? (because we know Putin did something).

All good points rr. I guess I’m just sick and tired of the lengths some power brokers will go to to keep their influence without regard to consequences to anyone. We’ve seen that in this election from the very start. Eddington seems to want them to either put up or shut up and that’s sounding better to me by the moment because the bullshit and counter-bullshit is what’s turning us into a banana republic, not any calls to try to improve our system via, say, the call for proportional representation within the EC (as posted above by THG).

The people here who keep insisting that this is a monstrously horrendous hair-on-fire act-to-end-all-acts don’t want to face a lot of things, not least of which is whether or not their own fears are reasonable or proportionate. Fine. Let Obama tell us what he knows because right now all we’ve got is a partisan war in the IC and Congress where nothing has been shown but a bunch of “reports” and “determinations”. Hell, in some places it doesn’t even look like fucking Congress has been shown any actual evidence at all.

I don’t even actually give a shit if the EC is actually stupid enough to try to reverse the result. I may feel differently tomorrow and your argument is compelling, but the way the EC is used as a manipulatory tool that enables them to ignore huge chunks of the electorate isn’t exactly a quality I feel worth preserving because, tradition, or whatever. The fact that this is even being considered just points out how pitiful and corrupt our political system really is. The center is far beyond rotten and what this whole election has shown is how fast something can implode when the very foundations have been/are being actively destroyed by those who should know better but just can’t fucking help themselves because of their disgusting personal and institutional levels of greed and power-mongering.

oh this is getting better by the hour!
oh Mr. Glenn Greenwald, the posting length is about to crash some systems.
can we get another page? i think this saga is going to continue into January. 2000+ posts, no way man, help.

The most logical explanation for the parade of leaks since Friday about why Russia hacked the Democrats is that the CIA has been avoiding admitting — perhaps even considering — the conclusion that Russia hacked Hillary in retaliation for the covert actions the CIA itself has taken against Russian interests.

Based on WaPo’s big story Friday, I guessed that there was more disagreement about Russia’s hack than its sources — who seemed to be close to Senate Democrats — let on. I was right. Whereas on Friday WaPo reported that it was the consensus view that Russia hacked Hillary to get Trump elected, on Saturday the same journalists reported that CIA and FBI were giving dramatically different briefings to Intelligence Committees.</blockquote.

The CIA elites were overwhelmingly for Clinton, those in the FBI, more so for Trump.

Marcy goes on to note:

Remarkably, only secondary commenters (including me, in point 13 here) have suggested the most obvious explanation: The likelihood that Russia targeted the former Secretary of State for a series of covert actions, all impacting key Russian interests, that at least started while she was Secretary of State. Those are:

-Misleadingly getting the UN to sanction the Libya intervention based off the claim that it was about protecting civilians as opposed to regime change

Creepy,the Russians were as sure as you the Hell Bitch would win the election.
Why would they jeopardize an already poor relationship that they already were concerned about,which of course was all zionist instigated propaganda of lies?Talk about walking on eggshells.
Does not compute one iota.
Go back to election prognosticating,you were much more on target there,although no bullseye,just air balls.sheesh.

And here’s an example of why I think the LGM substance and style of political analysis, is both overwrought, normatively problematic, counterproductive, and at times flat out wrong as a function of political fundamentals and history (whether as comparative to other nations and times, or America’s unique history, institutions, culture and present situation). It’s why I don’t think Lemieux or anyone there other than Loomis is even fit to carry Prof. Robin’s briefcase to class.

There are a lot of academic, intellectual, and scholarly reasons I could cite for why I say what I say about Trump, and you probably know them all, and they’re all relevant and important. But there is, I recognize, something deeper going on for me. And that is that I am fundamentally allergic to the politics of fear. That term is complicated (I explore it a lot in my first book) [emphasis mine and rec reading . . . Fear: The History of a Political Idea; also The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin], so forgive the very truncated, simple version I’m about to give here.

The politics of fear doesn’t mean a politics that points to or invokes or even relies on threats, real or false. It doesn’t mean a politics that is emotive (what politics isn’t?) or paranoid. It means something quite different: a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity. I loathe its belligerent confidence that it, and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world. I loathe the sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm it derives from being in touch with this awfulness, the more onerous citizenship, to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, it constructs on the basis of this experience.

And so if I have a weakness or a blind spot—and I genuinely see how it can be a blind spot—it’s to political discussions and mobilizations that repeat this kind of politics, even when they come from the left

Anybody is drawing overly broad conclusions about “America” and/or all its “citizens” from the antiquated electoral college victory of Donald Trump, or thinks the sky is about to fall, is making multiple paradigmatic or analytical errors across multiple disciplines–IMHO. And normatively engaging in a kind of “politics” that I will never be a part of and think is quite problematic regardless of whether/when it is practiced by the “right” or the “left”.

Donald Trump, at most, represents what barely 25-30% of Americans feel/felt, thought and/or think at a particular point in time. Given how our political institutions allocate power for those who achieve it electorally, that 25-30% “viewpoint” (in all its myriad components) can do tremendous damage to much of the remaining 70-75% of Americans who voted and lost, or who didn’t vote at all. Nobody denies that reality, but it must be kept in perspective and pushed back against proportionally with the nature of the actual threat(s) as they present themselves.

But it is the 40-50% of Americans who don’t bother to vote at all that is interesting to me. They don’t appear to “fear” either major political party to the point they can even be bothered to vote from “fear”, much less a preference for one or the other. And it is important to understand why. And there are reasons, and those reason need to be explored in depth and quickly, IMHO, if the Democratic party is going to regain its electoral footing in this country.

For me, given my rough alignment at this point with most of the nominal policy goals of the Democratic party (or at least what they should nominally be, but aren’t necessarily at present) that 40-50% is the untapped American resource that both parties ignore.

More importantly, the Democratic party can be content to try and do what they’ve been doing for decades which is slice and dice people into categories (anathema to most human beings, and not reflective at all of the complex motivations and views of individual human beings) and try and eke out 2-5% electoral victories over the GOP. Or, if they were smart, they would stop engaging in that bankrupt way of seeing politics, and the uncertain and inconsistent path to sporadic electoral victories it yields, and reconstitute themselves into something they once largely were.

They could start to figure out a way to actually stand for something coherently and consistently all across the nation that has simple universal aspirational appeal(rhetorically and policy-wise), not “fear of the evil GOP”/LOTE which is a loser. They need to appeal not only to the aspirations of the Democratic party’s existing “base”, but also appeals to the universal aspirations and “identities” of the 40-50% of Americans that rarely if ever vote if at all.

And you aren’t going to reach that 40-50% rhetorically or otherwise doing politics the way the “professionalized” Third Way/Centrist/Triangulating/Professional Consultant-Polling Industry/Big Dem Donor Class does politics. And if you do the Democratic party will continue to see only sporadic electoral success if any at all.

No election should be close in this country if the Democratic party would actually change itself to being the party of ALL working class people and middle management. But to do so it is going to have to play the “longer game”, it is going to have to get out of bed with its mega-donors and bundlers (and fund its candidates and incumbents with small dollar donations from the people they purport to represent instead of the ones they actually do), actually take concrete steps to empower the working class politically in America other than as “votes that are owed to their party elites every two-four-six years” (which of course they aren’t owed), and actually be prepared to fight for an America that serves the vast majority of America’s working class — in all its policies and rhetoric. That also means they are going to have to jettison (or have it electorally beaten out of them) their present understanding and policies consistent with neoliberal economics, and get back to something more akin to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights (and that is mutually self-reinforcing with “civil rights” for all of America’s minority or historically disadvantaged groups/identities):

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Now granted it will have to be tweaked because “mining jobs” aren’t the future but the rest is precisely how the Democratic party needs to both “message” and align its “policy platform”. Stick with it over the long term, engage in mass person-to-person organizing and GOTV around it (and specifically that 40-50% that doesn’t vote regularly) instead of billions of dollars on bullshit TV ads during election season and ridiculous sums of money on idiotic polling, surveys, focus groups and other assorted political consultant class bullshit “micro-targeted” at whichever identity group and coalition they think they can cobble together for a bare electoral majority in any election.

Hadn’t heard of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights so thanks for posting that.

I agree with your diagnosis but think the patient is beyond help at this point. The democratic party is showing, quite clearly at the moment, via messaging, votes for leadership, and the total disregard – nay, contempt – for the ideas that were espoused by Sanders, his supporters and people who voted third party, that they are not interested in giving up one iota of what they currently clutch in their tiny, crabbed hands.

If there is one thing that all the statehouse elections, governorships, congressional races etc should show, it’s that they don’t give a fuck about losing as long as they can keep their rapidly diminishing perks at the top.

In fact, it is actually quite astonishing to realize that the only person in all of this who seems content to just throw her hands in the air and walk away into the woods, is the one on whose behalf all of these faux battles are being waged. Hillary I’m-Done-With-It Clinton. And why not? Their family’s set for the next 10 generations. Nothing to do now but throw parties to thank all the millionaires and billionaires who lost so much money, and the only election that apparently mattered at that level of above-it-all, by continuing to ignore all the rest of us.

There is an old saying in science circles “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Assertions that the Russians had deliberate acts to influence the US election is a bold claim. So where is the bold evidence? Nada, zilch.

Instead we have formerly semi respectable Beltway mouthpiece newspapers (one, WaPo) passing out garbage so thin and silly that it appears to be an amateur hour disinformation project. The right question to ask about these supposed “intelligence community” consensus claims is this: why can’t or shouldn’t these spooks provide something credible as evidence for these extreme claims? What is the risk of “sources and methods” here? Of course the blanket response is “we can’t say or the bad guys will learn our methods, etc.”

Silly and absurd. If Russian intel was involved, would not they already be informed that the CIA, etc. have penetrated their operation here? Would they not already be back tracing their op to sanitize it?

It is similar to claiming that “we broke the XYZ military code” but won’t say how we did it. The important thing here is that the code was broken, not how it was done. The XYZ code will be changed.

Clinton, Podesta, et. al. sunk their own political boat. If they “lost” because of leaked emails, etc. it is not the “fault” of leakers but of the contents of those communications by the writers.

One has to ask, with the CIA, etc. now so politicized, what is their real value to American security? Given all of the past blowback and scandals (and assassinations) they have on their record, why not just abolish these thuggish liar agencies? Time to drain that swamp too.

Hillfarmer
December 12 2016, 5:24 p.m.
The First Amendment does not protect malicious, anti-American “speech” that is intended to overthrow the legitimately and democratically elected President of the United States

You substitute an accurate word for the inaccurate “overthrow”. Then yes the free press clause was designed primarily to speak for and against government entities.

It’s time to call for the arrest and prosecution of Washington Postbreitbart/infowars etc.propaganda operatives who are literally staging a “soft coup” via coordinated media fabrications.

“call for the arrest and prosecution”
That’s illegal. Under such laws, you would see Glenn Greenwald “arrested and prosecuted”.

For reference:Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

But what has this to do with the election?
To put a cloud over it?
To convince electors to vote for Hillary and create a constitutional crisis (like they love to do by packing the court and destroying any appearance of fairness and rules – whatever it takes, Mandates are Taxes, the Emanations and Penumbras that don’t stop the NSA forces Gay marriage, etc).

The left is defined by moral relativism, lie, cheat, steal, whatever as long as the policies get through.

The problem is not that there is an Alt-Right that might be nationalist or worse, but that the Core-Left has exposed itself as entirely amoral and corrupt.

Isn’t it time we cut old Joe McCarthy a bit of a break?
When the secrets of the Venona Project was made public sometime around 2006, it became clear that his lists were actually based on SIGINT, and that it was not a complete witch hunt. This sort of muddles the difinition of “McCarthyite”.
Let’s go back to the term witch hunt, and keep old Joe out of it.

THE LOAD OF DONKEY POO THEY ARE PUSHING , THE RUSSIANS GOT TRUMP ELECTED. HOWEVER THEY CANNOT SAY OR PROVE IT BECAUSE OF NATIONAL SECURITY ? If there was any real evidence Corn Flakes and his vassals would be parading it before White House Press & News Media.

The “news”of the alleged Russia hacking is properly described as fake news
I’ve seen no proper statement regarding that. Can you link to it?

and there is a coup in the USA

Undoubtedly, and it’s a coup taken place over about two decades (e.g., Gingrich, Kobach, Husted, GOP trifecta states), and recently complicated by multiple catfights – Bannon vs cu_ks, and HRC ‘neolibs’ vs reformers.
By appearances, Bannon is winning, but the President elect cabinet appointments prove that Bannon was always ideologically indistinguishable from the Koch cu_ks. The remaining question is how closely the Koch cu_ks are entwined with the rest (including Putinist) of the oil and corporate globalists.

Excellent article. Keep calling BS on these ridiculous stories. Other news outlets are running with this as well. I’ve heard it a couple of times on NPR and they seem to be treating this even more definitively than WaPo:

Apart from the lack of concrete evidence and the loss of credibility of US establishment institutions, are you asking if there’s also healthy skepticism that Russia would risk a major international incident by directly interfering in a US election? Yes, I believe there is.

If Russia were accused of conspiring with the Democrats instead, what would happen? Obviously, in that case, you’d join us in denouncing the absurd fear mongering and McCarthyism.

The politics of fear doesn’t mean a politics that points to or invokes or even relies on threats, real or false. […] It means something quite different: a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity. I loathe its belligerent confidence that it, and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world. I loathe the sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm it derives from being in touch with this awfulness, the more onerous citizenship, to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, it constructs on the basis of this experience. […]

In any event, among the many reasons the election of Trump has so depressed me, why I’ve not commented much since the election and have mostly stayed off social media, is that it has given license to the politics of fear on the left. Particularly on social media. Once again, we have that sense that we are face to face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. Once again, we have that sense those of us who insist that the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being. […]

So while I won’t ever look away from what Trump is, I insist on looking upon him through the categories that I would look upon any other political formation. I insist on focusing on things like policy, law, institutions, coalitions, ideology, elites, and so on. […] I insist on seeing in him the normal rules of politics and the established institutions of politics: it wasn’t the beating heart of darkness that sent him to the White House, after all; it was, in the most immediate and proximate sense of a cause, the fucking Electoral College.

The beating heart of darkness just illuminates the cul de sac so many alleged liberals wrap themselves in,a laughable fear of America first which would liberate US from the actual dark heart of zion,whose by deception they shall rule has so many confused.
I think we have a lot of fifth column phonies here.

Sheesh, sorry Pedinska. I must have been typing my comment above while you were posting yours. If I’d seen it I wouldn’t have posted.

I just wanted to link to it because I respect Prof. Robin’s work, and generally align with his ideas and worldview, and not sure many are aware of it, just like not enough are aware of Prof. Woldin’s, or Prof. Lakoff’s, or Prof. Zinn’s and a whole bunch of others that I think have a much better academic and practical understanding of America’s history, institutions and cultural forces at play than most of the present day commentariat (Glenn and a handful of others excluded) that frames the borders of “serious” debate in this country.

If you think Profs. Robin, Wolin (sorry for typo above), Zinn, Lakoff or Chomsky for example are about “dividing and conquering” human beings in service of the Zionist state, you’re even dumber than I thought.

The First Amendment does not protect malicious, anti-American “speech” that is intended to overthrow the legitimately and democratically elected President of the United States. It’s time to call for the arrest and prosecution of Washington Post propaganda operatives who are literally staging a “soft coup” via coordinated media fabrications.

Why don’t we start with you Mona. The anarchical speech that dithers from your greasy fingers every day would be a fine example. That white noise you exihbit truly is Indistinguishable background vibration at this point. Alas, there you have it. And while I have you the fact that our government is considering shutting down fake news outlets Like “the intercept” doesn’t seem to bother you in the least.

I acknowledge that there is little evidence. Yet if we’re going to be open-minded, shouldn’t we also bring in consideration of the other extreme? What if Trump is not merely “the better candidate for Russia”, but genuinely loyal to Putin? What if he wants the F-35 thrown into chaos because it is a big threat to Russia, and is sowing discord with China trying to set off a war between Beijing and Taiping in order to destroy any chance for a unified front against Russia? Do we have any evidence to say that what he is doing is not merely partisan but explicitly tailored to promote Russian interests over all else?

What if he’s a reptilian alien who’s about to bring about a new reptilian world order?

Look. Donald Trump will promote interests: His own. What he cares about is his wealth and being perceived as a winner. If doing business with Russia is in line with his personal interests, he will do business with Russia and everyone else who goes along with his agenda.

Indeed, there is not enough evidence to validate the CIA’s assessment. That’s why Obama’s review and Congress’ and the private security assessments will be important. Consensus matters.

But what I find striking is that Glenn and the rest of TI don’t use any of their resources to do their own investigative reporting on this matter. Why is that? Perhaps they have no sources, which would be pretty damn sad, but I doubt they’re incompetents. Hell, Scahill had a source in AQAP so I think they’re capable. So what do TI’s Russian and U.S. sources have to say about this? What about private security officials? TI needs to quit being reactive here; just summarizing others’ work, and instead supplement it by getting in the mix themselves.

But what I find striking is that Glenn and the rest of TI don’t use any of their resources to do their own investigative reporting on this matter.

Do you really believe they aren’t investigating this behind the scenes? They would love to have a new scoop, surely. Scahill & Schwartz have a new article pressuring the Obama administration to declassify what they claim they have. (The bet is that there’s no there there.)

All we have is a WaPo story telling us what some people said to them. Why should we believe WaPo?
Unless the CIA issues an official statement, the WaPo story is fake news. It cannot even be called government propaganda. As the US Government has not issued a proper statement or any statement claiming Russian hacking.

The “news”of the alleged Russia hacking is properly described as fake news and there is a coup in the USA.

Unless the CIA issues an official statement, the WaPo story is fake news. It cannot even be called government propaganda.

That is false and wrong.

First, as Greenwald and many other reasonable others have observed, there is no definition of “fake news.” It’s simply a made-up thing useful primarily for DNC/Clinton hacks. And secondarily, it is useful for Trump followers and assorted other cranks who shriek that various pieces of journalism that debunk their unhinged conspiracy theories are publishing “fake news.”

Additionally, uncritical spewing of government claims, whether true or not — and sourcing to anonymous government sources and agencies with a very low reputation for truth-telling — is quintessential propaganda.

“This is all about the CIA and zions fear of being exposed over 9-11.”

JFK was ready to smash the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. Perhaps someone is trying to smash them again, for 911.
Russia seems to have rescued Syria from the CIA/Zionist dream of a new homeland for Palestinians.

Donald Trump presents real dangers of the abuse of official power, given his contempt for democratic norms, his vindictiveness, and his evident taste for violent retribution. But we should also be very concerned about his eager encouragement of hatred and violence that bubbles up from below. With a president who will be regularly propagating crazed conspiracy theories and singling out individual citizens as targets of his displeasure, it’s only a matter of time before another of his well-armed supporters decides to take matters into their own hands, and this time finishes the job.

Gert writes:

Where I am it’s behind a paywall.

In Chrome you can get there incognito. (h/t Bill Owen)

As for Karl: The WaPo link is to the Plum Line blog. They are independent of the rest of the site and are generally smart and reliable.

Moreover, WaPo publishes some good stories and opinions, as for example Bart Gellman’s Snowden-documents reporting, or the op-eds Glenn has published there. Pieces in which the fact claims are either not controversial or they are well-supported.

The facts coupled with reasoning in Plum Line blog’s examination of the myriad lunacies Trump and/or his supporters promote are compelling and worrisome.

The best way to sell a lie to the American public is to sandwich it between two truths. The fact that there are exceptional stories which occasionally come from the Washington Post does not negate the fact that, as a BLoved opinion shaper for the CIA, every article must be scrutinized with a jaundiced eye. Even the name of the blog itself is seductively suggestive of Mark Twain and his his capacity to fathom the muddy waters of the Mississippi; who, better then Twain, could engage the American people with fictions that are purportedly meant to convey higher (noble) truths? I have repeatedly posted the Grahams illustrious collaboration with the CIA on Intercept threads, so I will not belabor the point.

Yes, because “official statements” from the CIA are always so trustworthy. [eyes rolling]

Moreover, government propaganda, including lies and falsehoods, does not constitute “fake news.” It is and remains propaganda. No one has offered a sensible explanation of what this new thing — “fake news” — supposedly is.

I didn’t evade your question at all. I used exactly the same technique you did in posing it, making assumptions of my own to counter the one you made. The one that began with the word If.

Emails, hacking, collusion, and social media manipulation are all tentacles of the same sea creature.

Yes, that’s very true, which makes my point about how the DNC/Clinton campaign should have used better computer security absolutely applicable no matter how much you want me to set it aside as a mere detail. Details, after all, can also be alluded to as “facts”. You don’t get to accuse Russia of interfering then pick and choose which bits of interference you want to consider important milton. That’s just dishonest argumentation.

I think you argue that voters vote. Their votes silence all dispute. Misinformation, miscounts, mistakes, and miserable winners don’t count.

That isn’t what I argued at all, but keep setting up those strawmen to destroy. In fact, what I said was that the emails likely DID count, I just didn’t characterize them as misinformation, as you would prefer. As for the rest, I would be just as happy as you to see those things no longer affect our elections. ALL elections, not just presidential ones, so if you have suggestions for doing away with them in entirety in our system of so-called democracy then have at it. Barring that and/or a successful Clintonista campaign to do away with the electoral college then, once the voters vote, yes, it is, in fact, a done deal, no matter the disputes which have, demonstrably, NOT been silenced (and I’m fine with that too because nothing will change without dispute).

Then you call arguments regarding nuclear war specious. Well, I would say that it’s not specious to note that we’ve already had such near-confrontations with Russia. I believe that’s what happened during the Cuban missile crisis. YMMV, of course, on decisions about where/when we should be pressing one of the few other countries who have nuclear arsenals that compete on a level close to our own – even as we continue to meddle in the affairs of countries on their very borders, something we wouldn’t tolerate ourselves – but I would suggest that the public should first be given absolute fucking proof, as opposed to what we’ve been given thus far, before we start talking about which big sticks we will apply in our hegemonic battles.

We should have learned something by now about how escalation happens in conflict and the dire consequences that result from insinuations/misrepresentations/outright lies, but we probably won’t because the only thing that seems to matter anymore is our national and/or partisan pride.

…the dire consequences that result from insinuations/misrepresentations/outright lies, but we probably won’t …

Right now I’m trying to process the fire-hose of insanity that is US politics. On the one hand, Trump is backed by generals and Goldman Sachs bankers…just as Clinton was. On the other hand, Trump leaves open the possibility that decades old backroom deep-state consensus may be discarded.

But ultimately, voters knew what Trump was. He made it no secret that he was unpredictable, inexperienced, had vast holdings and conflicts of interest, including in Russia, had no respect for others or convention.

Not sure I understand your question. Americans who voted for Trump aren’t freaked out. They view his unpredictability, inexperience, vast holdings, and lack of respect for others or convention as highly positive attributes. Americans who did not vote for Trump are freaked out because they see those attributes as scary.

You don’t get to accuse Russia of interfering then pick and choose which bits of interference you want to consider important milton. That’s just dishonest argumentation.

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

Nonsense #1. In advertising, litigation, news presentation, and virtually everything else since be fore the Age of Rationalism, we understand that others points of view differ from our own. Calling different points of view “dishonest” is … well, … the reader can supply whatever term they want.

Nonsense #2. I can accuse anyone of anything. My obligation is to objective reality, not to the target of my accusation. (Generally speaking.) Those facts, details, and various other phenomena you disparage as “dishonest” are critical to making an accusation. Unlike the virulent right (<- yes, that's pejorative), my goal isn't political advantage or obfuscation. Truth matters no matter how you try to diminish its inclusion in an argument.

Nonsense #3. I haven't yet made a case that Russia is guilty. I've tried to make the case that Russia's interference should be considered rather than peremptorily dismissed as a partisan attempt to discredit Trump's election. I haven't even started talking about means, motive, opportunity, and history that implicates Russia.

If you can't handle the mere suggestion of Russian intervention in the US election — or even the kind and degree of interference, I suspect you will run from the facts like they are a swarm of bees and you will a handful of their honey.

what (we) cannot handle is the insistance that the words of few constitute physical evidence just because they say they determined it. That is a violation of trust because it PRECLUDES one from making a due process challenge. And as you know, due process in the US is being whittled away with wmd, NDAA (carl levin) and secret spy courts and laws.

If one is content going down that road then one should also expect that one’s leanings (from lack of overt support to the contrary) without feeling one is being challenged to a duel. ;-)

ALL elections, not just presidential ones, so if you have suggestions for doing away with them in entirety in our system of so-called democracy

The point of elections, I think, isn’t just the act of voting but demands an act of participation in government. By voting, we citizens and those elected acknowledge the primacy of the person rather than the dominance of those serving in public office.

They are here for us rather than us for them.

In history, this is a rather stunning reversal of feudalism, monarchy and various autocracies. The ritual of voting demands an acceptance of democracy.

We’ve lost that. In the coverage, in the speeches, in the rallies, in the advertising, in the money, in the secrecy, in the partisanship, the vote has become an empty ritual. Putting aside the two most recent lip-flappers, we realistically don’t matter as individuals. The vote is about factions rather than a nation of citizens trying to determine what’s best in a deeply troubling world.

Of the thousand or so posts here, very few show any appreciation for the grand experiment of democracy; the catcalls and hand waving seem entirely in the domain of spectators at a sporting event rather than participants in self-government.

So no … or yes … whatever … the best solution is the one we have.

And it isn’t working.

Worse, and this is the problem with Russian intervention in the US election, we can’t know the truth. There’s not even a forum — not a court, not a congress, not a campaign, not a newspaper. The State has lost its credibility so that many would rather a buffoon in charge than a technocrat in charge.

I doubt either truly reflect the wisdom and influence of the electorate. So despair becomes the default.

Then the winners, those who complained most before the election, insist that they won fair and square.

Trump blabbers himself into a simple truth: it’s only fair if I win.

Who disagrees … when they win?

Who agrees … when they suffer?

Having ceded our agency as citizens, why do we think we have a right to complain?

Just to move laterally a bit, There’s a CNN piece with Van Jones talking to actual people, after the election, one of the few times the cable channel blows the budget, travels to talk to real Americans, (as opposed to having talking heads talk about them)

What I found illuminating was this passage:

JONES: Wow! Yes, well, I mean that’s a — that’s a heartbreaker, I think, for a lot of Democrats to hear. One more thing I want that — that blew my mind when we were talking. I’m a, you know, strong believer that we need to have good common sense gun regulations. I’ve been talking about that. I’ve been going on about that. You know, I do a lot of work in urban environments. We’ve got too much gun violence.

But when you hear something about guns and the Second Amendment, you think about meat in your freezer. Tell us about that.

S. SEITZ: Absolutely. When we get a downturn in the economy, we need to still feed our families. And when they talk about the Second Amendment or taking our guns away, that’s exactly what we think of, all the time that we have hunting together and, as a family, and we got out and we harvest and we put food in the — in the freezer.

It’s a good illustration of the limitations of logic in the context of US politics. To non-Americans, and many Americans as well, it is a no-brainer that there should be some control over automatic handguns used in the tens of thousands of gun deaths each year in America. You register your car….why not your gun?

But to many Americans, it’s: You elect Clinton….you starve for lack of meat in the freezer.

it’s a complicated issue. It’s the difference between part time and full time law breakin’. Cattle rustling and poaching are illegal – especially in the off season. Taking the guns only exaccerbates the issue as game traps and bear traps work, but aren’t really a sharing sporting event. Making matters worse, when the ice caps finish melting there will be NO SNOW. Without snow the rivers dry up, ponds and lakes will fester before drying up, disease will spread, food supplies will dry up, people will go starving crazy mad insane, so how do you protect what is left in your freezer?

Do you actually think it insane that the PTB wouldn’t like to retain puppet #1?
A no brainer,but of course attainable only by deception,which is how they rule,btw.
The creepy moderator loves the CIA,Obomba and zion,despite her rhetoric to the contrary,I notice.

You forgot about the Inhumans. The ones that live at the Earth’s core. Perhaps they are just biding their time.

This whole farce smells like DNC politics to me. IMO, the DNC is setting the stage for Act 1 of a Trump presidency. They are going to badger him with the Red Stooge Label for 4 years in the same manner Trump badgered Obama for the birth certificate.

The only difference is that the DNC hasn’t released the Promo name for it yet. I’m sure that will be coming in the next few weeks.

“…….Noted British diplomat Craig Murray, a friend and associate of Assange, meanwhile, has fully discredited the accusers and exposed them as a desperate, seditious conspiracy……”

Craig Murray thoroughly exposes his political agenda and – at the same time – thoroughly discredits a reference to himself as a human rights activist with this doozy at the end of his blog article:

“……..As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on…….”

It is hard to call yourself a “human rights activist” (with a straight face) when you support the continued targeting of hospitals and indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the Russians and the Assad regime in the Syrian conflict. It takes an incredible amount of arrogance to accuse the CIA of lying while you have a massive lie at the top of your blog (“human rights activist”). Craig Murray is certainly no human rights activist. Most human rights activist don’t support bombing of any sort let alone what is going on in Aleppo. Craig Murray is far left wing anti-American political hack just like Assange which is why they are friends. He has a political agenda (like most of us).

Murray presents zero evidence for the DNC hack being an insider job. We are just supposed to take his word for it. If he knows the hacker then name him. After all, isn’t Greenwald railing against the Washington Post for using anonymous sources?

He’s made a statement, with his name attached to it, unlike the anonymous CIA officials. Plus Craig Murray is not a liar.

If he knows the hacker then name him. After all, isn’t Greenwald railing against the Washington Post for using anonymous sources?

I doubt you’re this much of an idiot. You know damn well you can’t reveal the identity of sources who could be put in danger if their identity is revealed. The source would need to come forward on their own. It’s not the same when the government itself is granted anonymity to push its narratives without accountability. This has been explained countless times.

“……I doubt you’re this much of an idiot. You know damn well you can’t reveal the identity of sources who could be put in danger if their identity is revealed. ……”

Really – pure bullshit. He is in danger of going to jail because what he did was illegal. Indeed, he can always take refuge in Russia, right? That individual is going to have to come forward because no one is going to take the word of a friend of Assange except idiots on the far left.

“……. Plus Craig Murray is not a liar……”

Calling himself a human rights activist is a lie. They are almost the first words in his blog.

You really think someone like Craig Murray would risk his name and reputation by making a false statement? Note that what he’s saying would have to be unequivocally true or false. He can’t weasel out of it by claiming he was “deceived by the intelligence” or anything like that (as you will in time.)

So you are asking me to believe that the CIA, FBI and 15 other US intelligence agencies conspired to wrongly point the finger at Russia knowing that another hacker responsible for the hack could come forward at any time? That independent cyber-security firms (crowdstrike plus two more) with their reputations on the line also joined that conspiracy when they identified the well known footprints of hackers associated with the Russian government (Cozy Bear etc.)? That seems fairly impossible to me, but we will just have to wait and see. That person will have to come forward and be questioned by law enforcement for the Russian theory to go away. Nothing else will suffice

All those firms and agencies can weasel out of it by saying “we did have IP addresses and patterns — who could’ve known?” — as per usual. Craig Murray can’t. There’s a qualitative difference between the claims.

you need to understand 2 things since you have gone off the rails here.
1. Craig Murray’s statement is a shot across the bow to the dumb&dumbers stupid enough to push their wmd propaganda into actual action based on their high fallutin BS. Which means that if WAPO or dumbers want to initiate an investigation with consequences, they had better be prepared to look like the fools they are. I am assuming their is another room at an Ecuador embassy.
2. J_ S _ S loves you. Wanna buy a vowel?

“Really – pure bullshit. He is in danger of going to jail because what he did was illegal. Indeed, he can always take refuge in Russia, right? That individual is going to have to come forward because no one is going to take the word of a friend of Assange except idiots on the far left.”

Lightly edited for clarity

Really[, my logic is ]pure bullshit. [I’m] in danger of going [going insane] because what [I] did was [immoral, unethical and/or just plain stupid]. Indeed, [I ] can always take [the ridiculous storyline about]Russia[and keep running in circles in the hopes people won’t notice.] [I like to continue government lies about] individual[s who can’t] come forward because [I know they cannot defend themselves so they are an easy target for me. I also know everyone] is going to take the word of a friend of Assange [over] idiots [like me but what else can I do?]

hey craig – are you in Haifa?
you know, Haifa Israel?
you know, israel? the rogue apartheid state just south of lebanon and west of iraq and south of syria and north of egypt?
you know, that place that refuses to sign the NPT and is sitting on 200 – 750 intercontinental ballistic missiles which acts in perhaps more self defence as say, North Korea, and whose leaders are pretty much in the same tent.
Haifa?

I take the point that not wanting to rely on secret, unverified allegations is not the same as opposing an investigation. However, an investigation now would most likely be politicized in the service of a foreign policy agenda, namely hostility against Putin and Russia. The accusations against Russia are a hue-and-cry instigated by a bi-partisan, pro-war cabal. Might we not be better off to debate foreign policy, rather than be drawn into an argument that will probably not clarify anything very much, anyway?

Might we not be better off to debate foreign policy, rather than be drawn into an argument that will probably not clarify anything very much, anyway?

Alas, Foreign policy is highly classified and can only be spoken of in hushed whispers off the record.

Thankfully, the paper of record endeavors to clear some the muddy waters around foreign policy, now quoting un-named ‘law endorcements’ officials:

A senior American law enforcement official said the F.B.I. believed that the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions. Whether one of those goals was to install Mr. Trump remains unclear to the F.B.I., he said.

The official played down any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media.

The agencies’ differences in judgment may also reflect different methods of investigating the Russian interference. The F.B.I., which has both a law enforcement and an intelligence role, is held to higher standards of proof in examining people involved in the hacking because it has an eye toward eventual criminal prosecutions. The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments.

criminals indeed
just out –
1. first the dumb&dumbers of MI? (cia sibling) say that russia is a threat to terrorism in britain.
2. Boris Johnson (good man foreign office) tells it like it is
The British government “has been selling billions of dollars [worth] of arms to nepotistic despots in the Persian Gulf region without an iota of concern about human rights,” he added.

So who is fomenting terrorism? Obviously the populations of America and UK are being victimised by the party jackasses playing to their thieving greedy wallstreet tycoons and backed by the propagandist media and lying gov agencies which get Americans killed. And these rats want to blame Putin?

Russia forced Hillary to use a private server, they forced the campaign to write embarrassing emails, they forced the DNC to break its own charter by foregoing neutrality, and they programmed Hillary to be a lousy candidate.

Damn, they’re omnipotent as well as nefarious!

What’s going on here is an attempt by the Dems to overturn the election if they can or to at least de-legitimize it. They already have their hacks going on TV to claim the election was illegitimate. Bouie (sp?) of Slate is the latest to appear on one of the news channels and make the claim that the election was illegitimate. They’ll use whatever tools are in their rusty tin box.

and in case the Dumb&Dumbers still want a no-fly-zone, and in case the pimped out wallstreet media havent the weybones to announce to the American people because they are still pushing wmd, mil contracts and death..Operation to liberate Aleppo reaches end, militants leave last holdouts
presstv

Take, for example, this precious gem: “The F.B.I. began investigating Russia’s apparent attempts to meddle in the election over the summer. Agents examined numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank.”

Got that? There was an “unexplained trail of computer activity” and (presumably also unexplained) “email account at a large Russian bank”. Well, both were explained, actually, and quickly dismissed as vile hype.

But apparently the “journalists” who concocted this narrative were standing behind the door when that hyped up story was publicly dismissed as phony. Well known news apparently doesn’t always reach the newsroom when confirmation bias filters it out.

Here’s the Snopes analysis, including how the Hillary campaign piled on to promote this fake news, about which one twitter commenter declares: “This is some shameful shit “:

Excellent article, the best I have seen on this topic. The simultaneous leaking by anonymous officials of secret documents into the Washington Post, NY Times, and Huffington post reeks of desperation, a last ditch effort to invalidate a democratic election. You raise an excellent point that interagency fighting between the CIA and the FBI may be behind this. I wouldn’t absolve Obama, however. He has prosecuted media leaks more than all other presidents put together. We have seen repeated official “leaks” alleging Russian interference. No repeated leaks occur without Obama’s acquiescence, if not complicity. While befriending Trump in public, Obama is doing his best to create enmity between Trump and the CIA. The CIA is famous for overturning governments, lets hope they don’t succeed in the US.

The only foreign agents in the CIA are zionists.In fact,it and the SD are totally in the tank for a foreign criminal government called Israel,which of course is as clear as day to patriots,but traitors disagree.
Let US salute the Electoral College which saved US from more zionist dictatorship,at least until they carry out this attempted end around on American democracy.
Remember,whom the gods destroy they first make mad.

it might also be quite worthy to note that Julian Assange and Craig Murray, both of whom know the identity of the leaker, have unequivocally stated it was not Russia. This has CIA “soft coup” written all over it. How many coups has the CIA been involved in, either attempted or successful? It’s at least 4 dozen between 1953 and 2011… then it’s probably a duck.

“Who are the people summarizing these claims to the Washington Post?”
There are some people who should get a free shower in a facility in Cuba. After a good cleanup they might tell you who is behind it.
A “colored revolution” in the US might please a lot of people but in my opinion it would harm the whole world!
Sicerely George Soros
(have a nice X-mas)

What I find really incredible is that The Kremlin is winning all its battles: Hacking in order to influence USelections, Crimea, Aleppo, Snowden, Wikileaks, RT, Sputnik, 85%positive ratings……etc. While the White house is losing all its battles: HRC election defeat, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, divided USA……etc. At one point over here in Europe we might change sides and join the winner instead of sticking with the loser !

The Svoboda party has tapped into Nazi symbolism including the “wolf’s angel” rune, which resembles a swastika and was worn by members of the Waffen-SS, a panzer division that was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg. A report from Tel-Aviv University describes the Svoboda party as “an extremist, right-wing, nationalist organization which emphasizes its identification with the ideology of German National Socialism.”

Even more disconcerting has been the emergence of phone intercepts between high-ranking U.S. and Ukrainian officials which make it look as if the U.S. was basically, in the words of Princeton’s Stephen Cohen, “plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.” In other words, the U.S., in addition to providing moral support, may have paved the way for extremists to seize power in Kiev. Such a development would counter the American right’s condemnation of Obama for not “engaging” in the world. The real problem is actually the administration’s over-engagement in this case — as in meddling in the affairs of another state and trying to rearrange its domestic political machinery to suit Washington’s agenda.

This gambit has backfired in a number of ways. Not only has a neo-fascist-laden regime secured power in Kiev but it may have played the U.S. and its allies for fools by insinuating it would become part of the Western sphere when it really had no such designs. As Svoboda political council member Yury Noyevy baldly admitted: “The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration is a means to break our ties with Russia.”

Looks like craig’s ok with neo-nazis. At least, in some circumstances.

I am wondering if red- hack bating is the Dem Elite’s deflective tactic to preempt the many court cases that might find many illegalities with our primary/presidential electronic voting system. A system that does not hold voting machines accountable to any one election official or company or even demand impartial open review of elections where partisan warfare justifies the means. I wonder….

I agree with and thank you for the points you make about what is honest, competent journalism — as contrasted with the propaganda that the Post and our Government are feeding us. However, I still have the basic question: Why did Wikileaks choose to intervene in our Presidential election, by selectively releasing at several key points during the presidential campaign certain confidential materials that were obviously harmful to only one candidate (the Democratic one)?

why do you assume wikileaks had confidential materials that were harmful to trump to release? the materials were harmful because of the actions of clinton and her campaign, i’d think we would want transparency.

Wikileaks has a 10 year record of reporting the truth and a Pulitzer prize for journalism. They’ve published plenty of material regarding corruption all around the world entirely outside of US politics as well.

This isn’t an intervention. The democrats shouldn’t of played dirty, and now that they’ve been caught with their hands dirty their mindless supporters are crying foul on the same organization that exposed the bush administrations lies.

I concur with Justin Raimondo, quoted in Mr. Sapra’s response, that this is an attempted “soft coup” a la Brazil. I would remind the CIA and the corrupt, fascist Post that the old adage that when one shoots at the king, one dare not miss, might be a factor here. These actions by the Clintons and their acolytes now seem like sedition. Not directly on point but relevant is the proven fact of Israeli influence exercised in numerous US elections. Noted British diplomat Craig Murray, a friend and associate of Assange, meanwhile, has fully discredited the accusers and exposed them as a desperate, seditious conspiracy.

by Justin Raimondo, December 12, 2016
at original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/12/11/stop-cia-coup/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

“The CIA is up to its old tricks: overthrowing a democratically elected government. Only this time it’s our government.

As they are now legally allowed to do ever since the law against covert CIA propaganda in the United States was repealed, the Agency has leaked to the Washington Post reports – via anonymous third parties – of its alleged assessment of a Russian campaign to hand Donald Trump the White House:

“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

“Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to US officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“’It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,’ said a senior US official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to US senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The reaction of the Trump transition team was swift and cutting: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

This reference to the “intelligence failure” that led us into the most disastrous war in our history is not mere rhetoric: if you’ll recall, there was plenty of dissent within the intelligence community over the Bush administration’s conclusion that Iraq had WMD, and was getting ready to deploy, but this was stripped from the public documents. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby made several trips to Langley to browbeat analysts into submission and give the administration the talking points they wanted to justify the invasion.

It’s important to note that this leak was published just as President Obama announced he was ordering a full-scale review of the intelligence: the Washington Post story was an effort to get out ahead of that and put the CIA’s conclusions on the record before the review could be made public. This is obliquely alluded to in the Post’s story:

“The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal US assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior US official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” [emphasis added]

As we get down into the weeds, these unspecified “minor disagreements” seem a bit more major than the reporters at the Post would have us believe:

“Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior US official said. Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees.”

What does it mean to be “one step removed” from the Russian intelligence apparatus? Well, it means anything the CIA wants it to mean: it is clearly a subjective judgment, akin to the “criteria” by which the web site propornot.com identifies “Russian agents”: if you hold certain views, you must be “Putin’s puppet.” Another similarity to the propornot scam is that the “officials” cited throughout the Post piece are anonymous: we don’t know their motives, their positions, or whatever other information is necessary to evaluating their credibility.

What is missing from the Post’s story is any evidence: it is simply a series of assertions, offered without proof of any kind. That the Democrats, the warmonger wing of the GOP, and the media (or do I repeat myself?), are seizing on this was all too predictable. What separates this out from the usual rhetorical overkill that has characterized this election season is that it is being invoked as a reason for the Electoral College to vote for someone other than President-elect Trump.

“Ex”-CIA analyst Bob Baer – the unofficial media spokesman for the Deep State – is calling for “a new election,” although he wants to “see the forensics first.” (Guess what, Bob, there are no reliable “forensics”!). John Dean, White House counsel under former president Richard Nixon, “called for the intelligence report on Russia’s role to be made available to the 538 members of the electoral college before 19 December, when they formally vote to elect the next president.” Retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid accused the FBI of covering up the intelligence assessment, and called on director Comey to resign. The “progressive” Twitterverse lit up with hysterical accusations of “treason,” and not so subtle hints that the Electoral College must repudiate Trump.

Meanwhile, former British diplomat Craig Murray threw a monkey wrench into the coup plotters’ campaign by asserting what I’ve been saying in this space all along: that publication of the DNC and John Podesta emails weren’t hacks, but rather were leaks. Murray, a close associate of Julian Assange, had this to say to the Guardian:

“Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims ‘bullshit,” adding: ‘They are absolutely making it up.’

“’I know who leaked them,’ Murray said. ‘I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“’If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States. America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

Of course we had to go to the British media in order to read this.

Let’s be clear about what we actually know – and, just as importantly, what we don’t know — about the WikiLeaks email releases:

1) There is not a lick of evidence that the Russians, or anyone else, “hacked” the DNC/Podesta emails. That is, we don’t know if someone used electronic means to obtain them, or if it was an insider, i.e. a person with access who subsequently turned them over to WikiLeaks

2) It is nearly impossible to trace the source of a hack using “scientific,” i.e. purely technical, means. As cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr puts it, the methods of the professional cyber-security industry are essentially what he calls “faith-based attribution.” Furthermore, the methodology that firms such as CrowdStrike used in supposedly uncovering the “Russian hackers” in the DNC case are classic examples of confirmation bias and laughably inadequate.

3) Julian Assange denies that the Russians are the source of the emails, and although he refuses to identify the person or persons responsible, someone he has worked closely with and his known to have his confidence, Craig Murray, is now telling us that it wasn’t a hack, it was an insider who leaked the documents. That this is being steadfastly ignored in the American media is hardly surprising: after all, it was WikiLeaks that exposed the “mainstream” media’s active collaboration with the Clinton campaign, and the media was clearly in Clinton’s camp.

4) A key element of the CIA campaign is that the Republican National Committee was also hacked by the same Russian spooks, and yet nothing was posted on WikiLeaks Note how this assumes the premises of the conspiracy theorists: that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC/Podesta emails and that WikiLeaks is merely an extension of the Kremlin. Also note that the Republican National Committee denies it was hacked, and furthermore please note the fact that Colin Powell’s emails were indeed posted by DC Leaks, along with routine emails from various GOP operatives that had no particular significance.

So what is going on here?

When Trump supporters opined that the “Deep State” would never allow the populist real estate mogul to take office, I was skeptical. This seemed to me like a made-for-television movie script rather than a real possibility: after all, what could they actually do, aside from using force to prevent him from taking the oath of office?

However, as the campaign progressed, and the Clintonites became progressively more unhinged in their attacks on Trump, the Russian angle became more prominent: former acting CIA Director Mike Morell’s accusation that Trump is an “unconscious agent” of the Kremlin, and “not a patriot,” seemed over the top at the time, but in retrospect looks more like it was laying the groundwork for the current CIA-driven propaganda campaign.

But why would the CIA, in particular, have a special aversion to Trump? Marcy Wheeler, whose analytical abilities I respect despite our political disagreements, has this to say:

“First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.

“The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.”

The Saudis, having given millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with their Gulf state allies, were counting on a Clinton victory. The CIA has a longstanding relationship with Riyadh, and together they have been working assiduously to not only overthrow Assad in Syria but to forge a “moderate” Sunni alliance that will effectively police the region while establishing the Saudis as the regional hegemon. This was the Clintonian strategy while Hillary was at the helm of Foggy Bottom: Libya, Syria, the alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are all examples of this utterly disastrous “Sunni turn.”

Trump represents a threat to this grand design, and therefore has to be stopped by whatever means necessary. His desire to “get along with Russia,” his opposition to regime change in Syria, his critique of the Libyan misadventure, his foreign policy stance in general – all this meant that he would come to power and “drain the swamp” of the CIA and the State Department.

The irony here is that the accusation leveled at Trump – that his historic victory represents a successful attempt by a foreign power to take control of the White House – is a classic case of projection. What we are witnessing is a joint CIA-Saudi operation to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States.

In a recent speech given on his “victory tour,” Trump said the following:

“We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past. We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability not chaos.”

For the whole of its existence, the CIA has been in the business of toppling regimes that didn’t bow to Washington’s dictates, from Guatemala to Iran to Chile and on and on. The production of chaos is their whole reason for existing. Trump would effectively put them out of business. No wonder they want to destroy him.

We have heard much about how the CIA “assessment” needs to be made public, at least partially: of course, the details will never be published so that ordinary Americans can see them. It’s the old “we have to protect sources and methods” excuse. But cries – from both those who support the CIA and the few skeptics – for an “investigation” into the charges are simply playing into the hands of the Langley crowd. For an investigation assumes that the premises of the CIA’s case – that WikiLeaks is a Russian front, that the emails were actually hacked rather than leaked, and that there is some validity to the assertion that Trump is a “Russian puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it – are anything other than the basis of a smear campaign designed to undermine our democratic institutions. We might as well have an “investigation” into “Pizza-gate” or the belief that the moon landing was faked.

Yes, we do need an investigation – into this brazen attempt by the CIA to subvert our democratic institutions, and undermine the office of the President. When Trump takes the oath of office, the very first thing he must do is to launch that probe – and clean house at the CIA. The cancer of subversion that is festering at the core of the national security bureaucracy must be excised, and Trump is just the man to do it.”

The only sentence here that I disagree with “We might as well have an “investigation” into “Pizza-gate” or the belief that the moon landing was faked.

The only sentence here that I disagree with “We might as well have an “investigation” into “Pizza-gate” or the belief that the moon landing was faked.

Controlling the narrative is the name of the game. One cannot control the narrative unless on controls both point and counterpoint. When people like Justin Raimondo uses a trailer like the aforementioned “pizza-gate” to close out their arguments, you can be very sure that the primary intent of their article was to delegitimizing “pizzagate” from the get go; else why include it at all? It is akin to Chomsky’s treatment of those who have chosen to question the deeply fraudulent science upon which the 911 commission relied to publish its politically determined conclusions. Chomsky chose to characterize such efforts as a mere “distraction” from more important issues. Truth be told, the foreign policy blow back narrative of a radicalized Islam (in the person of Osama bin Laden) is as advantageous to advancing the aims of the left wing of the CFR as are the “inherently aggressive nature of Islam” arguments to its right wing. It has been the calculated range of debate between these “opposing” wings of the CFR that has almost exclusively informed American foreign policy for decades. Issues like pizza-gate and the WTC attacks of 911 are like free radicals in the body politic; unless they are immediately delegitimized, they could result in a chain reaction that would permanently undermine the illusion of choice (aka “democratic institutions”) offered to us by the corporate sponsored two-party duopoly.

I really have to learn to edit before posting. It is amazing how quickly one spots ones errors just moments after publication. It is as if I am using a different part of my brain when composing. For instance the opening sentence should have read:

Controlling the narrative is the name of the game. One cannot control the narrative unless on controls both point and counterpoint. When people like Justin Raimondo USE a trailer like the aforementioned “pizza-gate” to close out their arguments, you can be very sure that the primary intent of their article was to DELEGITIMIZE “pizza-gate” from the get go; else why include it at all?

The US establishment will use anything to discredit Russia and Putin. They are so obvious that they sound funny. This Trump presidency is going to drive the establishment crazy, we are going to see the most incredible situations in the American politics…daily, they can also be extremely dangerous. For sure Hilary is not going to be quiet, she is a real warmonger even at home. Canada should start thinking seriously on building a wall on the border with the US. That will be fun.

Here is evidence of the attempted CIA-Obama-Clinton coup against President Elect Donald Trump.

“Bob Baer, former CIA and current ‘Hunting Hitler’ shill, said in an interview today that if the evidence regarding Russia hacking the elections are true, then the only logical thing to do is to hold new elections.

‘If the evidence is there, I don’t see any other way than to vote again.’ ”

Why conclude new election? The nation should instead conclude that P. Obama & his administration are completely incompetent! All Powerful Oz threw down the gauntlet on Aaron Schwartz & fails to foresee an event like a foreign ‘actor’ fuc*#ing with antiquated voting machines?! Rome is burning.

You might want to consider that not so Gullible did not say that the CIA had launched its coup on Twitter under the hashtag #CIACoup and was tweeting its plans. What not so Gullible was pointing out was that the CIA coup launched through the Washington Post had been described on Twitter by citizen journalists under the said hashtag.

In total relation to any CIA (leaked) “Conclus[ions], a summary:
Regarding Fake News, the New McCarthyism, Blacklists/Watchlists, long-term barrages of (planted stories regarding) Russian threats, danger, and infiltration, along with desires for fulfillment of Censorship (overall) – including ongoing escalations of worldwide propaganda campaigns (with goals for further Regime Changes), consider whether or not it is truth that all these new WMD-style accusations were premeditated and prefabricated (well beforehand). Then, remember this word, PSYOPS – for their operations know no bounds. Whatever it takes to succeed will be undertaken (mostly from behind shadowed/closed doors), regardless of history, human lives, rights, actual democracies, sovereignties, moralities – or any post-Nuremberg statutes/proclamations. Further, remember Donald Rumsfeld (even though it was virtually erased from the internet) saying “We will lie to you”? (They have. They will. They are. They will continue). In addition, long before 9/11, massive surveillance measures (and related campaigns) were already (covertly) taking place (with controlled missions totally successful – beyond sight). Look up the story (or Keith Olbermann’s video) on Qwest Communications being asked to go along with them for a clearer picture of pre-9/11 operations – which could lead many to an understanding of what we really see and hear (of which has been escalating for decades). The PR pushes are presently rolling out nonstop, since a certain time is Now. And soon, the world will know the deeper meanings relating to an expression from a Karl Rove aide:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Millions upon millions will (at some present and future points) hold their faces in their hands, while expressing “Oh my God, it’s all a Lie.” Following those points, we (especially the poor) will have to find some way to survive with this new knowledge/truth — in this new ordering of our world.

(For a further historical-enhancing perspective, watch these two videos:

1) Rigged USA Elections Exposedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEzY2tnwExs
The true picture: Think, at least, 2000, 2004, and possibly 2016. Also, consider it as (most likely) being hacked here (many other times/in many other municipalities, states, cities, etc.) – and that it has absolutely nothing to do with Russia (which is a controlled campaign of actual New McCarthyism and actual Fake (CIA-type) News (Like This One) – as a means of cover for past and upcoming onslaughts).

We’ve had several references in this thread to the scary Pizzagate madness. I only had a general grasp of the story until I found a reference, in another WaPo piece I read today, to this excellent long form reporting It’s their hometown, after all):

What was finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint.

What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet — terrifying customers and workers with his ­assault-style rifle as he searched Comet Ping Pong, police said. He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.

What was false were the rumors he had read, stories that crisscrossed the globe about a charming little pizza place that features ping-pong tables in its back room.

The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It’s a tale of a scandal that never was, and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently.

Doug, yes, that is very good piece. Alex Jones is beloved of Trump. And per that story, this is what the legions of feverish Jones viewers are hearing:

On the far-right site Infowars, talk-show host Alex Jones repeatedly suggested that Clinton was involved in a child sex ring and that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, indulged in satanic rituals.

Such claims, when they become pervasively believed, are not innocuous. Last time such an insane pile of garbage spread over the country (and other parts of the globe), real people went to real prisons — for the purported crime of “Satanic ritual abuse” of children at daycare centers.

“By hacking into the DNC and releasing emails which showed shady dealings and a clear bias toward the corporatist warmongering of Hillary Clinton over the socialism of Bernie Sanders. These exposed realities made people increase their dislike of Clinton and the Democratic establishment.”

“So, regardless of the hackers’ identity, telling the truth is interfering in the election?”

You’re missing the point here. Even if what they – possibly the Russians – gave to Wikileaks was the truth, it’s still a foreign country interfering with the American political system. This time it was the DNC. But, who’s to say who it might be next time. I believe it should be investigated. And, if it is found to be true, we need to figure out how to prevent it in the future.

No, I’m not missing the point, you are avoiding the actual premise of the complaint made – around which all the fuss is being made.

The projection of a sinister utilitarian motive for the hackers upon an anonymous claim is at this point ethereal and insubstantial, and quite secondary to the central fact that if the content of the emails diminished Clinton and the Democrats then they deserved to be diminished, as the public in this “emails affected the election” scenario responded only to the truth displayed. It is well that people at high levels and elsewhere learn to protect themselves from hacking, but the obvious value in releases that expose the compromised antics of the very powerful (from both major parties, and the ruling class generally) seems clear enough.

We had an election, and the candidate favored by Washington, media, and many business elites did not win. Here’s what happened next.

CIA unambiguously but without documentation or evidence presented says, via anonymous leaks, that Russia interceded in the election to help elect Donald Trump.
Democratic Congresspeople, alongside several media outlets, have called for investigations into whether or not Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the election. That would be an impeachable offense, a criminal offense, treason.
The underlying message is that the Russians believe Trump as president will so favor them (for some reason) that they risk war, or a cyber version of war, to see him in power. Trump’s legitimacy is now undermined, and his every action toward the Soviet Union Russia will be tainted.
Meanwhile, Jill Stein, as proxy for Hillary Clinton, raised $7 million over a long weekend after claiming the vote count in three key states was wrong and/or the counting machines (not connected to the web) were hacked and cannot be trusted. A recount could have sent Clinton to the White House.
Clinton supporters continue to try and get the Electoral College to do something it has never done in some 220 years, select a candidate who did not win the most electoral votes.
Hillary Clinton has re-emerged, making speeches and public appearances, concurrent with all of the above.
Democrats as a group continue to insist winning the popular vote entitles Clinton to… something.
Clinton supporters earlier claimed the FBI interceded in the election to defeat Clinton.
Candidate Clinton claimed during a debate the now president-elect is a stooge working on behalf of Putin, literal treason.

This is banana republic crap, people, that looks to negate the votes of some 62 million Americans. We no longer believe in our own system. When the candidate many people did not support wins, the response is to seek to negate the democratic process, via accusations that make McCarthy in the 1950s look like a sad amateur.

What we have are anonymous voices at an intelligence agency supposedly dedicated to foreign intel saying the Russians helped elect our next president. That says the process is flawed and cannot be trusted, and that Trump will owe a debt to the Russians and can’t be trusted. It will keep alive the idea that Clinton should have won if not for this meddling and undermine for his term the legitimacy of Trump. Via the classification process, the CIA will only need to make public the snippets of info that support its contention.

This is an attempted coup as sure as it would be if there were tanks on the White House lawn. The CIA might as well have tried to shoot Trump during his next trip to Dallas.

To date, all of these accusations have been based on anonymous sources and leaks. The president of the United States remains silent.

America, our goose is cooked. You worry about an autocracy? It doesn’t have to be in one man. It can be via an Agency.”

The wholesale fabrication of false news stories by the Post, with the intended impact of denying Donald Trump the White House, is an act of sedition against this nation. It means the Washington Post, far from functioning as part of the “free press” to keep government honest, has decided to use its remaining influence to overthrow the government through the use of strategic, falsified articles that are timed to sway Electoral voters to throw their votes away from Donald Trump.

Janet Cooke “appeared on the Phil Donahue show in January 1982 and said that the high-pressure environment of the [Washington] Post had corrupted her judgment. She said that her sources had hinted to her about the existence of a boy such as Jimmy, but, unable to find him, she eventually created a story about him in order to satisfy her editors.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Cooke

While watching ABC’s national news broadcast [the real fake news] this evening it was mentioned that 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies had ‘sufficient evidence’ to show that Russia had a hand in hacking the most recent electoral farce – AND YET those same 17 intelligence agencies were totally in the dark when Dick Cheney and his neocon cabal orchestrated 9-11.

“Putting all this aside, Donald Trump obviously did not win the election because of help from Russia, and the CIA’s report actually falls short of saying he did.

As I have discussed previously, Donald Trump won because Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and because a great many Americans believe he will make their lives better.

The CIA statement however shows what Donald Trump is up against.

Already the Hillary Clinton Campaign has been actively lobbying electors on the Electoral College to switch support to Hillary Clinton from Donald Trump. Though this campaign is apparently meeting with little success, the CIA and the media are now assisting it, just as before the election the US intelligence community was trying to help Hillary Clinton win.

In both cases the method used is the same: the spreading of false stories and paranoia about Russia. The implication is that Donald Trump is in some way the agent of Russia, making any step to prevent him becoming President a patriotic duty.

I need hardly say that this is playing with fire. Never before in US history has there been an orchestrated campaign against an individual elected President in order to prevent him from being inaugurated. Never before has the US intelligence community involved itself in such a campaign.

Though I expect this attempt to fail, no-one should be in any doubt as to the huge anger of the tens of millions who voted for Donald Trump were it to succeed.

Though I expect this attempt to fail and Donald Trump to be inaugurated President on 20th January 2017, there is no doubt the campaign to destabilise him by painting him a Russian agent will continue after he is inaugurated.

Probably the only way he can stop it is if he publicly renounces his policy of rapprochement towards Russia, as some are already demanding.

Regardless of what eventually happens, it is both sinister and unprecedented for US intelligence to interfere in the US political process in this way.

As I said at the end of my 31st October 2016 article, the American Republican is living through dark times. Perhaps given that the political situation in Washington is starting to bear the hallmarks of what in other countries would be called a pre-coup environment, it is not so surprising if Donald Trump is choosing to surround himself with generals.”

The irony is that the Clinton supporters are complaining about a secret intelligence agency using secret methods and secret data to effect the results of an election. If wonder if in four years, the CIA will demand to vet all candidates and throw out the ones they don’t like.

One thing that’ll come out of the ‘the Russians stole the election’ meme is that it’ll almost replace (there’s the need to add the Trump supporters to get the full total) the ‘Iran has nuclear weapons ambitions’ meme as a way to get an accurate count of the number of Americans who don’t care what the facts are. Things like Birtherism, climate change Denialism etc inherently don’t show the full total because the fact rejecting partisans of one party have reasons other than the facts to not participate.

It’s amazing to me that no one with a platform seems to be pointing out what both “sides” are more than willing to quickly gloss over – that if Clinton’s electoral chances were hampered by the “interference” of releasing the emails, it is because of the damning content of the emails.

Ha! Absolutely – the Republican establishment no doubt avoids this point because they serve the very same elite circle which includes the Clintons and other ruling-class Democrats, and the Deep State itself of course, but why Trump’s louder supporters with any media clout would ignore this can only be down to how daft they are. And, quite obviously, if Trump was really anti-establishment he’d point it out himself.

Trump certainly isn’t anti-establishment. But he definitely is a thin-skinned, vindictive moron who is very likely to want revenge on whomever he thinks is responsible, if he sees this Russian meme as an attempt to upset his election.

I suspect that the grownups among the Owners (the Deep State, if you will) really did prefer Killary, because she’s clearly more manageable. Drumpf is certainly an agent of the same Directors, but he has that distressing tendency to. . . flip the fuck out.

He’s probably not smart enough to realize that his wisest choice is to do as you suggest. Besides, his natural instinct is to respond by plotting vengeance.

Is pizzagate really that overblown, though? I mean if someone had said 20 years ago that there was a pedophile ring in the Catholic Church they’d have been laughed out of town or worse. Or a pedophile ring at the British Broadcasting Corporation with a beloved kids’ host being the worst offender. A massive network of “pool parties” in Hollywood. Or a Muslim grooming gang among “refugees” or whatever in a small hamlet in England, a village in Sweden… practically all over Europe at this point.

It may look like a game of guess the secret password among Internet recluses acting out a James Bond LARP fantasy, but the idea of a child molestation network operating at the highest echelons of government, corporations, NGOs, religious bodies, you name it — isn’t so far-fetched anymore based on well-established precedents. I mean think about it. Why would Spotlight win the coveted Best Picture Oscar… while An Open Secret can’t even find a proper distributor (and keeps getting DMCA’d off YouTube by “third-party complaints” from IP trolls nobody has ever heard of)?

If anything deserves its own movie, it’s pizzagate. Sorry, but I’m not going to automatically dismiss this as “ludicrous.” Knowing what we know about the CIA and the depraved nature of the Clintons in the first place, I don’t count anything out.

Mia – totally agree with you. And if you look at Alefantis’ instragram posts with children related creepiness touching upon pedophilia-themed allusions, there is certainly a need to investigate James Alefantis.

The alleged debunking theory is also a dead giveaway that something is sought to be covered up.

What is the alleged debunking. To paraphrase the Wapo, That an obvious loony Edgar Welch, drove from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint. … He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.”

Now pizzagate as it is being called broke in early November 2016. The incriminating evidence is Alefantis’ instagram posts and some alleged pedophilia themed code in Podesta emails.

Now obviously there are no sexually abused children hidden in secret tunnels under Alefantis’ pizzeria Jimmy Comet. Pizzagate and the evidence does not suggest that. So the loony obviously found nothing.

But this does not mean that Alefantis and Podesta might not be involved in a pedophilia ring or might not exhibit pedophiliac urges and may or may not act on them.

So nothing is debunked.

I have not read Podesta’s emails fully. And the pedophilia clues there might or might not be true.

But I have looked at Alefantis’ instagram posts and there do appear to be what could possibly be described as pedophilia themed allusions.

This is what needs to be investigated by the FBI/ Police and the rest can unravel from there.

This alleged debunking is a classic cover-up tactic. To cover up something, create a discourse of exaggerated and obviously false allegations, then get someone to investigate the exaggerations and declare them false, and then suggest that there was nothing there to begin with.

And in this case use a complete loony who has no credibility whatsoever. And use his crazy antics to suggest that there is nothing that the FBI needs to look into.

And lets look at the alleged debunking as explained on the Wikipedia entry for pizzagate which is obviously written by the establishment in this context that would like this story to die.

According to wikipedia, “Pizzagate is a debunked[1] conspiracy theory”.

Under the sub-heading debunking, wikipedia states this:
” The conspiracy theory has been widely discredited and debunked by sources across the political spectrum.[2][6][33][39][original research?] It has been described as false by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, fact-checking website snopes.com and The New York Times, among others.[36][40][41][original research?] The police characterized the matter as a “fictitious conspiracy theory”.[2]”

Now look at all those references there. Not one quotes a named or even unnamed police officer as saying the matter was a fictitious conspiracy story.

Which Police has investigated Pizzagate and debunked it as Wikipedia wants us to believe? None.

All the references are to the loony’s alleged non-finding of abused children in underground tunnels in his own words.

It is a bit hard to take someone with such an, um, overcompensating mustache seriously, but it’s looking like he’ll be Trump’s number 2 at State, so….

Maisie, I’ve also been pointing out the fact that the issues the Dem party are having with emails – whether they be Clinton’s or the DNC’s – wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t been nefarious enough to have done such things, testified to it in emails, then been ignorant/hubristic enough to have not protected them. This disaster was of their own making and no amount of finger-pointing at the folk who set that information free in the public domain, whatever their own underlying motives are/were, changes those underlying facts.

I have wondered if the reason for the Republicans’ reluctance to honk that horn stems from knowledge that they themselves have also been hacked. It would make a sort of sick sense when you take into account the unity both parties readily express when protecting against attacks on the perks both enjoy as ruling elite. After all, both parties would dearly love to see both Snowden and Assange swinging from lamp posts. :-s

But then, anti-neoliberal political candidates began to win elections and, to the shock of the US foreign policy establishment, an increasing number of them stuck to their campaign promises and began implementing anti-poverty measures and heterodox policies that reasserted the state’s role in the economy.

Much of the story of the US government’s efforts to contain and roll back the anti-neoliberal tide can be found in the tens of thousands of WikiLeaked diplomatic cables from the region’s US diplomatic missions, dating from the early George W. Bush years to the beginning of President Obama’s administration.

If, indeed, it turns out to have been the Russian government behind the release of evidence that Democrats aren’t even sufficient to the task of protecting their own venality then, I think, it might behoove us to remind ourselves of that old aphorism,

I agree with the premise that there is no final conclusion or even consensus about what has happened but it’s definitely newsworthy and should be reported on. I also don’t see it as Mcarthyism at all as the questioned hack really did happen, no one denies that. What we need now is to examine what happened to the best of our ability. I think that is what is being argued for as the author doesn’t suggest Obama’s order to create a full report is wrong just the early leaking of CIA information.

Second the weight of evidence for Russian intelligence connections to Trump campaign is not conclusive but circumstantial evidence is piling up. Trumps own campaign manager, Paul Manafort really did work for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine and was paid millions in dark money. To believe he didn’t have ties to the Kremlin is somewhat hard to believe. There really was a server in Trump tower that only pinged a Russian bank. And there really was a hack and release of of emails on the democratic side while republican emails weren’t released when they had apparently been hacked too. If it was about transparency, release all emails and let the public decide. To reiterate, there’s no smoking gun but evidence is piling up and it definitely is newsworthy.

To this old IT professional it is obvious that the CIA is making it up.

Why would they do this, why would they show such hysteria? Did they think the Hillary would have given them the Cold to Hot war they want with Russia and that Trump will not?

Did Trump put the neocon warmonger lunatic Bolton under Tillerson to get the intelligence agencies off his back? Will Bolton be to Tillerson like Nuland was to Hillary? More suffering and death for millions?

The Dem’s have new blood in the pipe line but are afraid to parade them out, Muslim socialist like Congressman Even’s , communist crazies like Warren. The press hyped Sanders to make Hillary look centered, but it backed fired. The whole hype for Sanders was made up and pushed by the press.

Uh, we know…
“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” – Pierre Trudeau
We weren’t sure a crack house or a meth lab would be our neighbour after Nov 8…the meth lab it is.

Yeah, now I almost feel bad for ragging on the guy’s kid with the whole Castrogate thing. Castro certainly wasn’t Gandhi, but Obama’s no Mandela and Hillary’s definitely no Mother Theresa either. Sunny Ways may not be as smooth as his old man, but at least he’s aware that the US has its own glass house full of bloody shards to clean before they start throwing stones at the folks next door. Both in Ottawa and 90 miles from Miami.

likewise
here we go
RUSSIA DID IT?
How does mista obama explain this please….Aleppo militants safe passage deal with US unreal
[US] proposed a deal that would also mandate members of the terrorist group formerly known as al-Nusra Front to head towards the Syrian northwestern province of Idlib, but militants from other groups could go to other regions, including the Turkish border.
WTF? The US wants to give terrorists their own base to operate from.
EXCUSE ME?http://presstv.com/Detail/2016/12/11/497467/russia-us-syria-aleppo-denies

Is this a victoria nuland deal? a john kerry deal? i mean alNusra (alQueda subsidiary) and the US wants now to finance terrorists, and what, blame that on Russia too?
US dumb&dumbers still in action and running the country into the ground.

This is just another indication to me that the Democratic Party is dying and they can’t even for one second reflect on their loss with meaningful thought. They have to go back to being the party of the people or this is it.

Control freaks, who want their Big Government (and its police state) funded at the muzzle of state firepower; who want ACA imposed on people who don’t want it: who want gun control; who want Houston sermons subpoenaed, like Annice Parker did; who want Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby banned from their precincts, like Menino, like Emanuel, like Cuomo did;…call liberty lovers–wait for it–“authoritarians.”

You think Dick Cheney and John Bolton are leftists, right? Can you see what I mean about wires crossed? See my debunking of your Mussolini nonsense below (yes, he was a socialist, and then he became what he considered the “opposite” – a fascist).

You just offered a quote attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State…”

That’s communism.

The left’s objects of adoration always somehow “change” if the left gets sufficient opprobrium from a dispirited public, correct Maisie? Straight out of the same playbook, chapter and verse, used to call Obama a rightie once his progressive true believers saw the wider public’s disapproval of him.

You are now wasting my time. Anyone who reads our interactions can see you are flailing now, and grasping at straws. I have proved my point, and although I didn’t actually expect you to accept the truth you must at least now be dimly aware of the absurdity of your stubborn position.

You (pretend to) believe all totalitarianism (“a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible”), whether right or left, is always left-wing! You’re actually a childlike innocent, in a way, only viciously stubborn.

Note again what Mussolini said:

Fascism is the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism.

Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society….

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society.

Straight out of the same playbook, chapter and verse, used to call Obama a rightie once his progressive true believers saw the wider public’s disapproval of him.

Total nonsense. It became quite clear early on to many on the Left that Obama didn’t live up to his (perceived, advertised) progressive credentials. The general public didn’t seem to care about that though: he’s a two term president with a comfortable second election victory.

To rank and file Republican voters, Obama remains a paragon of progressiveness and that’s one of the reasons they voted for the ‘Emperor G-d’.

Get real, the U S is a big country and needs big government– that is the shoe size.
Donot want big gov– then go live in Mex and see what it is like.
What kind of a person are you when you do not want a basic healthcare for your fellow citizens?
I boycott chik and hobby– donot need those people believing in a demended god ruling me.
Yea, we pay the taxes they donot want to pay– that is what it is about.

Donald Trump presents real dangers of the abuse of official power, given his contempt for democratic norms, his vindictiveness, and his evident taste for violent retribution. But we should also be very concerned about his eager encouragement of hatred and violence that bubbles up from below. With a president who will be regularly propagating crazed conspiracy theories and singling out individual citizens as targets of his displeasure, it’s only a matter of time before another of his well-armed supporters decides to take matters into their own hands, and this time finishes the job.

Do read the entire thing. Preposterous conspiracy theories and ranting unmoored from rationality are frequently not benign, and are often not so in the instances of Trump supporters. Ideas do, indeed, have consequences; believe witches are real and that they hexing members of the community, and we see murders of women and men as witches.

Oh sweet irony! In the very article where Glenn Greenwald eviscerates the Washington Post for being a tool of propaganda for the deep state, Mona chooses to quote then as a credible source when their express views align with her own bias.

Pizzagate notwithstanding.. it’s only a matter of time till Der Smartest Man on the Planet gets someone killed directly from his twitter dementia. On that day, when the FBI is forced to arrest him, after praying for the victim, I’ll be ROTFIGSL at his dumbass supporters.

While I agree that it is far too early to make any official claim about foreign interference (direct or not), I’m wondering how else they are supposed to respect the anonymity of sources? Seems like discrediting all anonymous officials – either on the basis of their anonymity or because others at their agency have lied before – is a great way to discredit some real leaks.

Glenn, I agree with you in the abstract, but this argument to patiently await the facts is a move that was best made several turns ago. We are well past the point of conjecture. Several lawmakers from both parties, including Trump supporters like Nunes, have made reference to their intelligence briefings in stating that the patterns of the hacks are highly consistent with Russian spycraft. Putin has already done this in the Ukraine and other Western democracies in an attempt to induce acquiescent stances on Russian expansionism. The timing – and the fact that only DNC leaks came forth starting with the convention – is equally suspect….”striking,” you might say, as you did say with respect to Marcy Wheeler’s argument. It is also unconvincing to try and impeach senior intelligence officials for bias against Putin on the basis that they previously spoke against him – leaving alone that perhaps those statements were made on the basis of verifiable data and experience. So while it’s not a smoking gun, it damn sure looks like a bullet hole. It merits a follow-up.

Evidence aside, let’s talk about your pathos-driven ad hominems. It is becoming more abundantly clear that your experience with Edward Snowden has fostered a knee-jerk anti-CIA position wherever possible. The CIA does have a sordid history, and yes, spy agencies lie. But that does not invalidate the entire agency for all time. The Iraq WMD reference is a poor dodge. It is a matter of public record that the CIA reported to Scooter Libby that there was no evidence that Hussein purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger; the VP’s office cherry-picked the data and fed it to the White House. This was confirmed by Joe Wilson and later his wife, Valerie Plame, and virtually the entire intelligence field. I suppose because she wasn’t your whistleblower, and your byline didn’t get any play, that you choose not to believe her?

As for Neo-McCarthyism on the part of Democrats, you can put that away. McCarthyism was an active effort to ruin lives based on constantly shifting “evidence” the Senator couldn’t support (c.f., Trump’s gross distortions based on rumor and hearsay magic). There is evidence to support the narrative, and you’re hitting low-hanging fruit im the form of Adam Schiff. I have also yet to meet any Democrat who refers to anyone who opposed Hillary as a Russian stooge. That is a sexy straw man, but don’t be tempted by its curves.

What is truly “disgusting” is the idea that this piece will be taken as a cutting edge example of independent journalism…when what it really is is a fact-free, mud-throwing axe-grind by someone who long ago forgot the distinction between healthy skepticism and reactionary cynicism. The latter is, to me, no different than sycophantic gullability.

By using the term “Russian expansionism” you show that you are either clueless or a lying propagandist. It is in fact NATO and the U.S. that are expanding toward Russia, and Russia is basically trying to defend itself. NATO and the U.S. broke their promise to to not expand almost as soon as they made them. I’m not saying that Russia and Putin are good guys, but it’s not them that’s expanding.

The corporate, hard progressive left New York Times’s (and CNN’s, and NY Daily News’s) A1 relentless promotions of immigration control; and gun control, and Climate Change; and trans; and ACA; and TPP; and yellow cake uranium excuses to erase yet another border is, according to a humiliated progressive left, is, um, not really representative of progressives.

It’s representative of opportunist, cynical corporatism, just as Donald Trump is in his deceitful way.

Progressives, libertarians and paleoconservatives could unite against corporatism (crony capitalism), militarism and imperialism, as their commonality is opposition to these things, but not while people like you don’t understand the English language well enough to communicate effectively – instead butchering it to suit your own purposes and supporting Trump’s totalitarianism as if it’s different in anything but degree from Obama’s entrenching of corruption.

I know you have your wires crossed, and that you can not see the right wing as ever wrong – which is why you have to claim ludicrously that everyone not a paleoconservative is a left-winger (presumably Dick Cheney is a leftist, and John Bolton) – and I know you won’t listen to reason nor read the dictionary for accurate word definitions – but, for God’s sake, all you’re doing doubling-down this nonsense is proving you don’t actually live on the same planet as the rest of us, casting yourself as a fever-dreaming, isolated voice spitting out reactionary defensiveness like a cornered animal no one should approach.

Neither Mussolini nor Hitler initiated “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole” – which is the definition of socialism.

But wait, perhaps those pesky leftists have changed that definition, too!

Well, let’s look at Mussolini, the fascist:

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) over the course of his lifetime went from Socialism – he was editor of Avanti, a socialist newspaper – to the leadership of a new political movement called “fascism.”

[Mussolini stated in his entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism] Fascism is the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism.

Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society….

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage….

Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State…

…The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone….

No, that’s fascism. Communism is “a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.” (Oxford Dictionary) Not the merger of state and corporate power which Hitler and Mussolini engaged in, although just as totalitarian.

Now read Mussolini’s words again, trying to keep your blind spots out of the way. It’s not socialism, and he was clear to differentiate his system from socialism – as he says.

Yeah, he must’ve changed. Like chastened progs now insist Obama changed. You know, coincidentally after their leaders fell out of favor with a public waking to the dark underbelly of progressive leftism.

He only said, “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State…”

Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society….

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society

Dude, I think we’re done here. I showed you by his own words that Mussolini was no socialist after he initiated what he called fascism, and really that was the point I was making in response to your claim (that he was still a socialist). You don’t have to be pissy about it.

But continue to talk to yourself if you want to. After all, you’re the only one who speaks your language.

Brilliant. You’ve discovered fascism was statist. Since communism (as understood today) is also statist, it must be the same thing, according to you. Given that communism comes from the left, it follows that fascism is also leftist. Brilliant train of thought :)

The reality is that Hitler and Mussolini hated leftists, a lot like you, and for the same reasons.

so are regressive rightists like hitler. rightists have always hated leftists, notoriously so. hitler went after the socialists first. i think i remember you from the guardian, under another name, you have bizarre definitions of political terms, which you expect every one else to agree with and adhere too. not happening, humpty dumpty.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

pretzelattack, your predecessors used the same playbook, chapter and verse, as they later used with the public on a progressive Obama that the public also came to dislike–as they did earlier in trying to redefine the founder of the National (as in NPR) Socialist Workers Party in new terms convenient for a progressive left with egg on their faces after Nuremberg.

Hitler’s profound disagreement with Goebbels (and the latter’s subsequent falling in line with Hitler’s fascism) also springs to mind here:

During these quiet years, Joseph Goebbels first came to Hitler’s attention and experienced a quick rise in the Nazi hierarchy. Goebbels, a brilliant but somewhat neurotic would-be writer, displayed huge talents for speech making, organizing, and propaganda. He was a rarity among the Nazis, a highly educated man, with a Ph.D. in literature from Heidelberg.

Goebbels was a little man, about five feet tall, who walked with a limp as a result of infantile paralysis. He kept a diary which reveals how quickly he became infatuated with Hitler.

“Great joy. He greets me like an old friend. And looks after me. How I love him!” Goebbels wrote after his second meeting with Hitler.

But this ‘love’ was tempered by ideological differences. Goebbels belonged to the Nazi faction led by Gregor Strasser that actually believed in the ‘socialism’ of National Socialism and had sympathy for Marxism, a sentiment totally unacceptable to Hitler.

In his diary, Goebbels describes his reaction to a meeting in which Hitler attempted to straighten him out.

“We ask. He gives brilliant replies. I love him. Social question. Quite new perspectives. He has thought it all out…He sets my mind at rest on all points. He is a man in every way, in every respect. Such a firebrand, he can be my leader. I bow to the greater man, the political genius!”

And later, after spending a few days with Hitler at Berchtesgaden…

“These days have signposted my road! A star shines leading me from deep misery! I am his to the end. My last doubts have vanished. Germany will live. Heil Hitler!”

Even after being battered by the truth, you return (like a dog to its own vomit) to claiming he was a socialist! Benito Mussolini, as I’ve demonstrated for you, distinguished his fascism by scorning socialism – so unless you wish to claim he was a moderate (which would be hilarious, but you’ve already claimed he was socialist so you couldn’t), that would make him right wing. Of course the dictionary also defines fascism as right wing, but you have already cavalierly dismissed that as the work of “embarrassed leftists” editing the dictionary, so we’re going to have to go back to Mussolini himself:

“Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.”

“Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.”

“State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all.”

“The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state.”

[From his letter to Hitler, as quoted in Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm] “The solution of your Lebensraum is in Russia, and nowhere else… The day when we shall have demolished Bolshevism we shall have kept faith with both our revolutions.”

I have already pointed out that totalitarianism certainly exists on the left and the right, and that progressives are distinguished on the left as not supporting totalitarianism or authoritarianism, just as the libertarians and (ahem, TRUE) paleoconservatives resist it on the right – but fascist totalitarianism exists only on the right wing.

Now if you want to define all those blockquoted statements above, and the others already given earlier, as coming from a socialist (which you have claimed, obviously in error), you are going to have to admit you are using a different vocabulary from the rest of the educated world.

As such, you should probably talk from now on just to yourself, as only you speak your unique and ill-informed language.

101: “The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state.” or its variants, has actually never been attributed to anyone, let alone Mussolini.

You might also attempt to answer why Mussolini raises the state to primacy regardless of how he disavows its correlation with other leftist ideals. He was, after all, the editor of the largest Socialist newspaper of his day on record.

And another thing: I absolutely can’t stand hypocritical crap like this about other countries. The U.S. is the primary cyber attacker on the planet, yet they push propaganda against Russia and China for doing the same thing that the U.S. does far more effectively and far more often. I hate religion, but I totally agree with Jesus: look in the fucking mirror before complaining about other countries.

This McCarthyism is nothing but the Democratic establishment trying to hold onto power. Instead of accepting more progressive policies and platforms, the party elite are obsessed on blaming others for their party’s decline and continuing to be just another corporate party.

Since Bill Clinton, the U.S. now has two Republican parties: one virtually a Nazi party, the other what used to be mainstream Republicans.

When someone commits a crime,a good motive is usually required, what motive did Putin have to prefer Trump? Here are two [but not real motives at all]. “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,” he told MSNBC.
Vladimir Putin defends Donald Trump by saying the Presidential nominee behaves ‘extravagantly’ because he is like ‘ordinary Americans'[Daily Mail]
However Clinton wanted to confront Russia and make them pay a price etc etc. Trump wanted to be friends with Russia and together defeat Islamic State, he may also recognize Crimea as part of Russia. No contest really, a possible peaceful world via Trump or we could all be glowing in the dark via Clinton.

An increasingly disapproving electorate saw that Obama is progressive. Eight years of vol-…er, “folks;” and medical advances; and smashing down borders; and population control; and solar symbols; and Thule and Black Sun philosophy…. Wow, were they ever wrong.

Obama is really a rightie. Just like their embarrassed, chastened precedents corrected the record about their National (as in NPR) Socialist Workers Party after the exposure of Nuremberg. I mean, who shows up with craft beer in hand on the doorstoop that the coffeehouse flier said was for a National (as in NARAL) Socialist Workers Party?

Again you let Obama off too easy saying his reaction to all the anti-Russia hysteria has been muted. His calling for an investigation is deceitful because he knows full well there’s nothing to investigate. Nothing will come of this investigation because he’s a lame duck president and nothing he does means anything so he has nothing to lose by doing this but helps the Clinton machine further its aim of delegitimizing the election. This is all a big sideshow because the establishment is mad that its candidate Hillary lost. Michael Morrell is crying that he won’t get to run the CIA after endorsing Hillary, thus ensuring himself that post or some other high-level one. Michael Hayden wrote a column in the Post right after the election in which he told Trump that the intelligence community is his best friend. What an about-face! These hypocrites have no shame and Trump is right to shun the useless intelligence briefings by these smug bureaucrats with their endless war agenda.

You’re wrong. You couldn’t be more wrong. That insane shit that Mona claimed “communete” has posted previously has been here and at previous Greenwald sites going by name after name after name. He always has repeatedly and relentlessly posted precisely what Mona stated that he has posted.

He didn’t post it today. He posted some snark equating progressives and the establishment.
-Mona- cannot not launch into personal attacks that end with ‘people need not respond to person X’.
like her “95% of the time” bullshit as she continually feeds CS.
She’s the most disruptive commenter here; has been since her days of Ommo/Ondy …
she’s running multiple puppets responding to herself, again. I call it crapflooding.

I can understand your abiding frustration with those who express genuine and/or unique opinions Gert… it must be torture to think about living in a world without your strings to govern your every thought and action. But you can take solace in the fact that your puppet master is as every bit as vulgar and disingenuous as yourself.

P.s I resent the fact that I am not labeled “resident Loon 1.” What does a sincere human being have to do to warrant first place in your tangled web? Maybe another puppet opinion is in order for the sake of creating the illusion that you criticisms actually have merit. You can debate whether, or not, I warrant the degree of attention in absentia that I am currently COMMANDING from Glenn Greenwald’s “most loyal fan” and former business partner (;

P.s. Thank you for getting the name right (Karl with a “K”) – Tata then, sweet cheeks…

As a parting gesture of pity for the perpetually pathetic, here is a little toon from a white, heterosexual male that I believe you can actually appreciate when you think of me:

I can understand your abiding frustration with those who express genuine and/or unique opinions

You have in the recent past expressed that typical “concern” of so many faux “dissidents”: that you’re being ‘silenced’ or ‘browbeaten’, while of course being TOTALLY FREE to express your rancid weltanshauung loudly, here or anywhere else. Just don’t expect respect or agreement from many here. You’re no more a dissident than anyone else who expresses an opinion at TI.

To earn the title Resident Loon I, you’d have to beat Communete’s level of craziness. For now you’ll have to settle for well-deserved runner-up, in close contention with ‘nut said’.

Wow, a 112 word retort in just eight minutes! You must be sitting on the edge of you seat just hoping that I would take notice of your flirtatious barbs…

As “weltanshauung” is defined as “a comprehensive conception of the world,” I am a little taken aback by your flattery. It was the Sinatra piece that did it, am I right? C’mon, admit it, you snuck a little listen, did you not? I mean, who can resist ol’ Blue Eyes, am I right?

Tooraloo (***Blush***) Mona

“Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,
Hush now don’t you cry!”

Andsince I caught you in such a playful mood, here is classic ditty from another white, heterosexual American of Anglo-Saxon descent (they didn’t all carry disease)

A half dozen? That is a gross underestimation. She and her troupe have been attempting to control both sides of the conversation for years in Glenn Greenwald’s arena. It is not enough to stack the deck in your favor by having your puppets echo your views. Creating and controlling Greenwald’s perceived opposition gives her almost complete control of the ensuing narrative on every thread. Take a careful look at those whose tactics closely align with hers and you will begin to see a discernible pattern that has been repeated with ever greater levels of sophistication over the years. You know exactly what I mean, don’t you nuf?

It was this very behavior that made me first question Glenn Greenwald’s personal integrity and the “progressive” agenda he purportedly champions. We are ultimately judged as much by our methods as we are by our intended aims.

Difference being, Glenn does not believe I crapflood. By contrast, he’s banned your accounts several times– for endless spewing of unhinged bullshit about Hitler, mind control plots, the Illuminati, the Bilderburgers & etc. Shockingly, the material I post is not, um, along those lines.

Glenn may not be aware of the oppressive volume of banter and egging and baiting and responding and hero worship and other posting you immaturely hijack each and every one of his threads with. He only knows you as a former law partner. You stand out among regulars for your abject saturation of the comments forum.

Glenn pays attention to his comments section. Reasonable people have frequently thanked me for the many articles I provide and link to. You…not so much. No one has thanked you for your links to Fritz Springier or, e.g., that deranged, antisemitic “Russian monk,” Brother Nathanael. Rather, several — and I do not mean me — have implored him to ban you.

You seem confused, but you’re not. This is just a pathetic attempt to start a narrative that has no internal consistency. You’re trying to associate anti-establishment progressives with the establishment they oppose. Good luck with that.

It’s not rocket science. The establishment pays lip service to popular low-risk socially progressive causes. At the moment, LGBT rights are quite popular, so they are useful. Indeed, they are often used to beat on adversaries of the American empire that are behind on LGBT rights. In a different era, the establishment wouldn’t have cared about LGBT issues. This is easily illustrated by Clinton’s “evolution” on the issue. It’s opportunism, plain and simple.

True progressives stand for stuff that isn’t particularly popular at a given time, such as being for gay rights in the 80s, or against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or against extra-judicial executions today.

It’s your progressive-leftist promotion of Big Government that gives you police state (and its extra-judicial executioners you decry). You knowingly demand, and demand funding of, what is reciprocated to you as police state and surveillance state.

Are progressives backtracking on their wish to invade Syria? (Too late for Libya.) Progressives’ cohort across the aisle, the neos (as in new, improved, with-it, lefty anodyne, Rockefeller Republican), helped the progressive left into Iraq. Border-transgressive nation builders that you are.

Get it through your head that the establishment is devoted to corporatism, militarism and imperialism.

(These are not leftist, and your preferred definition of words is not going to change the dictionary.)

True libertarians and paleoconservatives do indeed often oppose these things, but they do not support Trump and his agenda – which is evidently crony capitalist, militarist and certainly evidences no sign yet of anti-imperialism.

Your supporting Trump proves you are not a paleoconservative at all. Which means. according to you, that you’re a progressive.

“There is not just smoke here. There is a blazing 10-alarm fire, the sirens are wailing, the Russians provided the lighter fluid, and Trump is standing half-burnt and holding a match,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA officer and interrogator.

The CIA’s “Russia did it” narrative is in continuity with the ruling class ideology that hundreds of millions of Americans have been ingesting for years and years. The actual perpetrators and enemies of the American people are being obscured and instead a convenient scapegoat is being brought before us. The ruling class arrogantly expects that the public is so stupid that the ruling class’ accusations about Russian interference will unleash the public’s fury.

In 2016, civilians in this country should be examining the stories we have been led to believe about ourselves and about “America”. We need radical history, heterodoxy, like the work of Howard Zinn. Stories matter. Disobedience matters. Righteous anger matters. Civilians’ expression of doubt and skepticism toward Official Explanations is crucial to our self-defense and self-emancipation. It’s vital to loosening the psychological hold that the ruling class has on us.

Instead, what we see is the deliberate output and dissemination of lies from institutions such as the CIA which serve to advance the ruling class agenda. We hear the uncritical rehashing and regurgitation of official talking points.

The actual perpetrators and enemies of the American people are being obscured and instead a convenient scapegoat is being brought before us. The ruling class arrogantly expects that the public is so stupid that the ruling class’ accusations about Russian interference will unleash the public’s fury.

I’m mad now!

Damn ruling class!

Who do they think they are? Where do they meet to discuss who to scapegoat this week? I thought I was supposed to hate Mexicans and then they go and change it Muslims. I looked for a mosque or temple or whatever they call it. I wanted to give them a piece of my mind. Imagine that, not being Christian.

But no. The damn ruling class decided that now it’s Russia!

I mean GEESH! How does anyone keep it straight when there is so much to be furious about. It’s a good thing we have Trump to remind us of our persecution by the … which was it? Latinos? Oh wait … I know … it’s that crooked Hillary Clinton.

How do you know who the bad guys … oh wait … the CIA?

So the CIA is run by the ruling class. They got together with that Comey fellow to sink crooked Hillary and her Muslim sidekick Obummer. But doesn’t that make them the good guys?

The bad guys are Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, the EU, CNN, the Washington Post, the Clinton Foundation, all Hollywood celebrities (except Scott Baio and Clint Eastwood), the New York Times, liberals, feminazis who who voted for Hillary, McCarthyites, African Americans, the Bundys … wait … are the Bundys good guys or bad guys they’re rich but not like Vladmir Putin rich so whose side are they on?

This is just so confusing! Are you a good guy or bad guy? What about Mr. Greenwald? OMG! What about me? I voted for Clinton but I’m not a feminazi. I know that. Am I a bad guy too? Do I have to hate myself too?

Would you please identify those who are in the ruling class so we know who to hate?

I just don’t know who’s to blame any more.

But dammit! Someone is to blame.

Otherwise we will be filled with anger and have no one to hate! Nobody wants that, right?

As usual, the left blew it.
As usual, the right put party power over country and democracy.
And Glenn, we’ve all been had one way or another this year, you too. As someone who has followed you from your time at Salon, I sincerely hope you can find a way to stop your metamorphosis from useful tool to useless fool, but this defensive and desperate article doesn’t help your cause at all; admitting that you, the Intercept and Wikileaks may have been used to electioneer against HRC would be a good start.
For the record, I’m no smug Clintonista, I wrote in Bernie.

Glenn, you forgot reason #6:
6) The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon Web Services receives a substantial portion of its funding from the CIA. By serving as an outlet for CIA propaganda, Bezos enhances the competitive position of Amazon in pursuit of billions of dollars annually in CIA procurements.

As for the democrats, it speaks volumes about them that they focus on the ostensible source of the leaks, rather than on the content of the leaks themselves. It is clear that they truly do not see anything wrong with what they did, only that it cost them votes. They are not repentant; they are not introspective; they will not reform. Kindly remember these things in 2018 when Congress and much of the Senate is up for reelection.

“…After careful analysis of all the media punditry and the ‘leaks’ coming out from the CIA, I can only conclude that there is a concerted effort taking place to invalidate the U.S. elections, in an effort to unseat Donald Trump.

Last night the Washington Post reported a leak from inside the CIA, saying they had a report that showed evidence that Russia hacked the elections in order to elect Donald Trump. They’re being very specific about that point. Pay attention.

Source: Reuters
The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The front page at Reuters today is worth a look. How would the world (Latin American, African, The Asian Subcontinent or nthe Middle East react to a recognizable CIA White House coup. http://www.reuters.com/

Citing U.S. officials briefed on the matter, the Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to WikiLeaks.

The officials described the individuals as people known to the intelligence community who were part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and reduce Clinton’s chances of winning the election.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the Post quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”
The Post said the official had been briefed on an intelligence presentation made by the Central Intelligence Agency to key U.S. senators behind closed-doors last week.

The CIA, in what the Post said was a secret assessment, cited a growing body of evidence from multiple sources. Briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, the Post quoted officials as saying on condition of anonymity.

In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election.

President Barack Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks. But Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the U.S. election.

I was puzzled by Democrats latching onto irrational McCarthyite Red Scaring until I realized that disbelief and irrational action is one of the stages of grief. I’m picturing someone slapping a dead guy and yelling at him to wake up.

The Dems need to get over their grief and disbelief, pick up the pieces, and take action after asking why so many no longer trust them. They also need to work on substantive things, like reversing the horrible Gerrymandering that has allowed the GOP to own the House. They’ve done little about such things in their quest for corporate loot.

Glenn,
I have a question for you. Do you believe motives actually matter? You seem to contradict yourself, In an article you wrote on October 13 about the relevance of the John Podesta emails and reporting on them, your very first point was that motives shouldn’t matter yet in this article you are stating that we need to question the motives of CIA or other intelligence officials leaking info to the Washington Post and the New York Times. You were actually one of the journalists that broke the story about Edward Snowden, an intelligence analyst who leaked classified intelligence documents to you. Did his motives matter? Or, is it more important to you how much those leaks negatively effect the public officials whose partisan views you seem to disagree with or positively effect the public officials who you do agree with. Do motives matter? Because I do seriously question yours.

Murray presents the evidence for this in the above article. He also lays out how to get around this sort of suppression:

The only way to defeat this is to republish the article yourself. I waive any copyright. If you have access to a blog, copy and paste it there and post a link to that blog on Facebook. Or simply cut and paste my whole article and copy it to your Facebook page, in sections if required.

Apparently, what they can’t achieve by insinuation in the major media, they are more than willing to bulwark by suppressing those who seek actual facts and the truth.

Jose, Facebook collaborates with hyper-state (which is a progressive construct) and with the globalists who push hyper-state as a means to curtail liberties inherent in natural law rights. Those restrictions are progressive ones.

If you doubt that corporate hyper-state is progressive, you need only remember how Comcast-owned networks like CNBC inveighed against North Carolina’s bathroom bill.

i dont know mona and certainly dont mean her any ill
my point was “distraction” as to create another issue in the mix so as to convolute the entire who-did-it scenario as will play out when the president decides the murder of Seth Rich is worth looking into.

my emphasis was my last line that leaker would need an atty
did i screw this up?

No, you didn’t. I poked at the double meaning of ‘killing the messenger’.
-Mona- does it metaphorically while the CIA does it. You are quite right to assume family threats are in play.
(I cannot recommend -Mona- be hired as an attorney based on her blatant disregard for the US constitution.)

-Mona- attempts to discredit those she feels have crossed an obvious moral boundary. She is an enemy of free speech despite her purported legal training. Glenn went to SCOTUS to allow the Nazis to exercise their right to free speech. -Mona- dishonors continually Glenn’s work while reminding us, ad nauseam, that she was his former law partner.

-Mona- posted one of the best links I’ve seen in some time, regarding the WaPo story on the history of the US government interfering in foreign elections. A really great post from -Mona-. This is a genuine statement, -Mona-.

And then she labels someone’s simple, reasonable, post as something to be ignored because this “crank” has mentioned someone who has a website that publishes crazy stuff … while directing often commenters to her website which bashes the mentally ill. *

Her response to this post will be most likely the assertion, ‘nuf said is an anti-semite and a crank so we can all agree that he should be ignored.’; childish schoolmarm behavior.

* disclaimer: I am only guessing her web site bashes the mentally ill based on her posted excerpts. I’ve never clicked on her links that are not related to the article topic.

The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously. Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that one of the most insidious forms of misinformation is the truth. The truth can be used to obscure a larger truth. In this case, the larger truth is that Mr. Putin would have influenced the election if he could. The fact that he did not, while technically true, serves to obscure this larger truth in the minds of people who interpret things on a literal level. Facebook made the right call in this instance.

“In this case, the larger truth is that Mr. Putin would have influenced the election if he could.”

Chuck Todd, Meet The Press, went out of his way to make this exact point while Priebus pointed out how circular Todd’s argument was.
Ms. Strassel, WSJ, just said she has spoken to intelligence officials who say the “Russians got into the RNC system but were unable to get anything out.”

Yes, it seems so. Stephanopoulos repeated that CIA got the Iraq WMD story wrong was so one-off that it really is unfair for Trump to bring it up continually. He hammered this point.
There is a real sense of a shit-storm cooking. The mask of 911 is going to be ripped off at some point.

i do suspect these are all tied together somewhere
the MASK OF 911 indeed
shit-storm cooking, americans arent buying the bs from ws anymore
msm trying to bury 911 with this R-D-I crap
and constrain Trump
they must be quite worried, quite worried

all roads lead to 911
Adam Schiff did not seem to be the least bit open to more wmd bs which strikes me as odd b/c a normal person would acknowledge & respect the doubts. Carrying water for the Kremlin? unbelievable.

events and meanings when properly matched yield truth
mr zuckerberg is simply ducking out of fear of being blamed for aiding and abetting lies by those most interested in spreading lies
but mr zuckerberg in his limited wisdom for solutions is digging in the sand
his background of taking will result in his finding a formula to create the most acceptable reality.

There is a stark contrast with the care the WashPost showed in using the anonymous Deep Throat. Now it is uncritically accepting anonymous “officials” who relate second hand knowledge of what others are supposed to have concluded, without offering any supporting details.

This is left to look like it may be just another example of insider access journalism, “sources” with an agenda feeding their fake news to a friendly, credulous press.

It is so poorly done that it undermines what might be a better story. It is just bad journalism even if true.

Don’t worry, they’ll issue another smug, half-baked “clarification” to sort-of cover their asses when the bullshit piles too high. Just after the hysterical left moves on to the next, even grander conspiracy to explain how everything is clearly somebody else’s fault.

This is an excellent article, with valid points.
It’s so disheartening that the media runs will all the other BS instead of the real story.
Check Todd was just awful to Reince Priebus on Meet the Press today, all based on nothing factual.

There are beliefs In the CIA about Trump-Russia but people don’t realize intelligence analysts always propose alternative theories – it’s a sort of war gaming. Until one is selected and approved by upper management it is one theory among many.

This is just grasping-at-straws Red Scaring, more worthy of Karl Rove than a so-called newspaper.

Also, even if the Russians did do something it has nothing to do with Trump. If I have a hateful neighbor and someone threatens him so he leaves town I benefit. But I had nothing to do with the threat. That sort of connection is the faulty logic the GOP is famous for and now the Dems, sadly, are doing it.

…the United States does have a well-documented history of interfering and sometimes interrupting the workings of democracies elsewhere. It has occupied and intervened militarily in a whole swath of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America and fomented coups against democratically elected populists.

The most infamous episodes include the ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

…

In 1954, Washington unseated Guatemala’s left-wing president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had had the temerity to challenge the vast control of the United Fruit Co., a U.S. corporation, with agrarian laws that would be fairer to Guatemalan farmers. The CIA went on to install and back a series of right-wing dictatorships that brutalized the impoverished nation for almost half a century.

A young Che Guevara, who happened to be traveling through Guatemala in 1954, was deeply affected by Arbenz’s overthrow. He later wrote to his mother that the events prompted him to leave “the path of reason” and would ground his conviction in the need for radical revolution over gradual political reform.

Oh.

You mean it’s laughable for the United States, and polticos from both parties, to be shrieking in appalled horror at the possibility that Russia “interfered” in an American election by showing the voters how the DNC operates? Yeah, that’s what you mean, or should mean.

Actually, Liz Warren has developed a reputation as a coward and opportunist in progressive circles, for withholding her endorsement in the primary until there was a winner, and more recently, speaking out on DAPL apparently only after it was known that construction through Standing Rock would be halted.

Yeah, no, I totally decline to take political instruction from a crank like you, who endorses a literally criminal Fritz Springmeier is a font of Great Truth:

Fritz Artz Springmeier (also known as Viktor E. Schoff)[1] is an American right wing conspiracy theorist author, formerly a resident of Corbett, Oregon, who has written a number of books claiming that satanic forces are behind a move toward world domination by various families and organizations. He has described his goal as “exposing the New World Order agenda.”[2][3]

…

On January 31, 2002, Springmeier was indicted in the United States District Court in Portland, Oregon[10] in connection with an armed robbery. On February 12, 2003, he was found guilty of one count of armed bank robbery in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2113(a) and (d) and one count of aiding and abetting in the use of a semi-automatic rifle during the commission of a felony in violation of 18 U.S.C § 924(c)(1).[11][12] In November 2003, he was sentenced to 51 months in prison on the armed robbery charge and 60 months on the aiding and abetting charge….

Hiawatha Warren’s strident support of GS Hillary speaks volumes about her own values.
Many of you lost money to another Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, who let you know in no uncertain terms that the DNC is more important to him than you.@Communete

Hiawatha Warren’s strident support of GS Hillary speaks volumes about her own values.
Many of you lost money to another Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, who let you know in no uncertain terms that the DNC is more important to him than you.

A simple statement that many could get behind; Bernie is a sell-out, Warren is a sell-out.

Its next to impossible Russia did anything to disrupt our election other than printing truth at RT or their other media outlets.
And Pocahontas will probably be defeated next cycle,she’s been exposed as a complete fraud.

One way this can be resolved is if the source seeks asylum and comes forward. I realize that’s too much to ask of someone, but it would be a nice blow to establishment outlets and hacks. (I do believe Craig Murray. Unlike anonymous CIA officials, his name is on the line, and he doesn’t have a track record of being a liar. The track record of Wikileaks is also spotless, as far as I know.)

Glenn, you prove time and time again that you are a real and honest journalist: bringing up facts; calling out both sides when they are wrong, hypocritical, etc.; giving credit where due; raising your readers’ awareness of the real issues at hand; and writing pieces that are efficient and to the point. I turn to The Intercept more and more. Thank you.

Globalists really thought they were going to give you Bush Clinton again. They thought Americans were that stupid.

You should be thankful that a constructive thinker of independent means who wasn’t part of the axis entered the race. Many were thankful he didn’t play the apology games, give newspeak to progressive corporate media, thankful he said real things to an electorate. Voters reward that.

Mr. Greenwald is starting to realize that he was gamed by one of Putin’s operatives. Snowden wasn’t a truth teller, he was an agent of the Russian state–and GG ate his crap up with a fork.

Now Mr. Greenwald is trying to play the Alt-Right (how ironic given his orientation) “No Evidence” card. Sorry, Glenn–there’s plenty of evidence, and a sh!tload of congressmen HAVE SEEN IT. You just don’t have the clearance. Nor should you have it, given your history as a useful idiot for the ambitions of Vladimir Putin.

Your name will soon be — well, not Mudd, since Mr. Mudd was a doctor who did do good in his practice, having the bad luck to set the leg of an assassin — unremembered in the annals of world history, and if at all recalled, you’ll be “That propagandist that enabled the rise of fascism in the USA.”

The fake news that Trump is a racist and sexist–that fake news outlets like CNN and NYT relentlessly peddled–wasn’t lost on actual people. Homeless of color who asked me for money were occasionally polled ad hoc by myself. I asked them who they planned to vote for. They, said “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

They knew this building developer, celebrated in NYC for decades before June 2015, who Oprah warmly received as a television guest, isn’t a racist. They knew Hillary is a violent psychopath.

They know Dem machine politics, they know stacking ballots with SSI death index names and illegal immigrants is a Dem specialty. They know that clueless social justice warriors aren’t deep thinkers, they know the same ghettoize themselves in Cali, Mass, NY and then ask why their voting strength doesn’t translate to electoral gains.

But do they know about all the Satanically mind-controlled sex kittens and other zombies whom you know have resulted from the Illuminati’s plots, as set forth in several learned treatises by your favorite author?

Mona, you keep denying what communete says, however there is a lot of evidence to support Springmiere, L. Fletcher Prouty, and others. In 1974 a house subcommittee conducted an investigation into the CIA, in fact you can watch it on you tube. In that inquiry the CIA had to come clean about MK Ultra, operation paperclip, and mind control, amongst many other things. In fact, in 1972 a hospital in Montreal was shut down because the CIA were running mind control experiments and were caught. Which was the main catalyst to the inquiry. Not to mention it has been common knowledge for a long time that the CIA were running LSD experiments on unsuspecting civilians the 1950’s. I wouldn’t trust the CIA as far as I can spit.

Thank you for critiquing this story. In the wake of such loosey goosey reporting at traditional news outlets it’s no wonder that the “fake news” is so popular—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to take traditional news outlets at their word. Thanks for what you do Glenn. I hope one day the Intercept builds itself up to a daily, physical publication; how cool would that be; I could then trade in my “paper of record” nyt for some real journalism.

First, it is simply awfully patronising to the people who voted Trump. It’s telling them they have been manipulated by a foreign country and it chimes perfectly with the very same discourse Trump has been using. It will be CIA vs The People. Great.

Second, they do not say that what Podesta wrote has been faked. Sorry but if Clinton lost, it was because she was too close to Wall Street (the irony looking at Trump’s cabinet) and that’s what the emails showed. A successful democracy rests on information: for the people to make an enlightened choice, they need to know what they vote for. Hillary Clinton was close to Wall Street, the People didn’t like it and they voted for the guy promising to “drain the swamp”.

The choice for this election was a case of for the lesser of two evil… Hillary lost because, on analysis, she was not really better than a lying morally bankrupt sexist racist sociopath. And the Podesta emails showed just that: she is no better than this fat idiot of a man. And the CIA is trying to make the American public forget that. Pathetic.

A majority of “working people” — under any rational understanding of that somewhat vague term — who voted in the general election preferred Clinton to Trump. The key to getting this is remembering that people of color who work for a living are, in fact, working people.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that non-minority working class people are going to more easily fail to see, or to know and accept, Trump’s racism and his overtly racist supporters. Without being racists themselves. Many working class whites who voted twice for Obama, voted this time for Trump.

The reasons why they did so have everything to do with the failings of the Democratic Party, and especially the deep elitism of Hillary Clinton.
Moreover, this has been widely reported:

While black voters overwhelmingly supported Clinton, Trump lost by a narrower margin than his predecessor.

Trump won 8% of the black vote, compared with 6% of the black vote earned by Romney in 2012.

About 88% of black voters supported Clinton, representing a decline from 2012, when 93% of black voters cast their ballot for Obama.

That is simply amazing. Even as racist and awful as Trump and many of his appointees and supporters are, he got more black votes than Romney did.

Finally, and critically, Democrats cannot win elections if they lose too much of the white working class vote. They did lose a lot of that cohort, and have been, at the federal, state and municipal levels, for quite a few years.

We have an existential dilemna which is a clash between between the apparent need for eduation and the need to enjoy life with the assets we have so why go to school, just work to maintain if you have to.

When Kanye West gets his doctorate which he can afford to do, only then will i believe that education is an inherent demand.

Until that dilemna is fixed, we will thrive away on conflict and the pressure cooker will cook.

When Kanye West gets his doctorate which he can afford to do, only then will i believe that education is an inherent demand.

I would suggest that there are a great many people in the world who have managed to become educated about a great many kinds of things without ever setting foot in the halls of academia.

This is particularly true when one takes into account the democratization of education access inherent in the development of, and widening access to, the internet.

Why do you suppose tptb are fighting so hard to reduce/control that access otherwise? It isn’t just lack of education that causes conflict to thrive, but it is a factor, especially when the facts are deliberately obscured and/or framed as ridiculously manichean scenarios.

Really? I graduated with a BS, received additional further certification in the fields of clinical microbiology, mycology and mycobacteriology, then spent 30 years working at a university medical center doing HIV research.

I don’t consider myself brilliant by any means but I do find your broad brush as vaguely insulting as I find the one that labels the formally uneducated “dumb”.

Given a certain unique fact about Romney’s opponent, the fact that Trump’s tiny share of the black vote exceeded Romney’s does not strike me as even mildly surprising, let alone amazing.

While I would like to see Democrats pursue all realistically obtainable votes, I’m not sure what sacrifices would be required in order to successfully court white voters (“working class” or otherwise) who in 2016 found a perceived champion in Donald Trump.